With Finalbuilder 7 if we build our project using the Finalbuilder 7 GUI it takes about an hour (its a big project requiring lots of network/disk IO), however if we build it via FBCMD /p:projectfile (or Finalbuilder server 7 which uses FBCMD) it takes about 3 hours. This seems consistent difference across the individual steps for example the msbuild steps take 20 minutes each for release and debug in the GUI but an hour each using FBCMDs.
Does anyone have any idea why it is so much slower? Could it be logging or something else?
Just to add some information. Its all running on the same account under a Windows XP SP3 VM with plenty of RAM (3Gb) and not much else going on (on host or VM OS). This slow down has been experienced several times with real consistency (at least 10 builds via both methods, neither varying by more than 10 minutes).
An interesting observation is that our old script which used a ‘VS.NET solution’ (With MSBuild) action rather than an ‘MSBuild Project’ action shows far less difference in speed - 2 hours vs 2 and 1/2 hours. The old script did far more IO than the new one - it built each visual studio solution separately, then copied the binaries off to an archive and then combined them into a release media at the end. The new script just gets the source code down and builds the lot using a very simple msbuild .proj file that basically just calls all the visual studio solutions in turn with a version number - How can the speed vary so much? The new script was supposed to speed it all up.
I’ve just sent an email to your support address with the scripts in as I don’t want them made public. Hopefully this will allow someone to look into this a bit easier.
Thanks for your reply via email. Reducing the logging level of the msbuild and setting cpu count to all available sped up both the GUI build and Finalbuilder/fbcmds build (now 35 minutes and 55 minutes instead of 1 hour and 3 hours respectively). I’d still love to know why the Non-GUI methods are so much slower.