How to decrease build times / speed up compile time in Xcode?

iphone xcode build compilation performance
Brad Parks picture Brad Parks · Sep 25, 2009 · Viewed 40.6k times · Source

What strategies can be used in general to decrease build times for any Xcode project? I'm mostly interested in Xcode specific strategies.

I'm doing iPhone development using Xcode, and my project is slowly getting bigger and bigger. I find the compile / link phases are starting to take more time than I'd like.

Currently, I'm:

  • Using Static Libraries to make it so most of my code doesn't need to be compiled everytime I clean and build my main project

  • Have removed most resources from my application, and test with a hard coded file system path in the iPhone simulator whenever possible so my resources don't have to constantly be packaged as I make changes to them.

I've noticed that the "Checking Dependencies" phase seems to take longer than I'd like. Any tips to decrease that as well would be appreciated!

Answer

Reed Copsey picture Reed Copsey · Sep 25, 2009

Often, the largest thing you can do is to control your inclusion of header files.

Including "extra" header files in source code dramatically slows down the compilation. This also tends to increase the time required for dependency checking.

Also, using forward declaration instead of having headers include other headers can dramatically reduce the number of dependencies, and help all of your timings.

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