Incredibuild

I love it

Comments: I remember having some issue only once, and it happened very rarely. I posted it to a man from IB team, and got immediate reply with suggestions what to tweak in settings to fix that, which obviously worked.
Some of my colleauges says that the only annoying thing is that when they do a trivial change in code that needs rebuilding just that single cpp file, it takes more time than it should because IB does some initial task which we believe has something to scheduling jobs among clients, which in practice doesn't need any help because rebuilding just 1 file is enough to be done locally.

Pros:

It works just out of the box. We was worried that we'll have to spend a lot of time trying to make it work, especially that our projects are insanely huge. With all dependency libs clean build on 8-core cpu machine is around 25-30 minutes, and we often rebuild a lot because the code is very templastic, so touching one template triggers domino effect. Anyway... we was surprised when we just installed it, pressed button to build, and tadaa. Compiled in 4-5mins !

Cons:

When I hit compile on my PC, I feel like entire building is taking off like a helicopter. 50+ computers on our floor starts throttling up their cpu fans :) Which is also kind of impressing.

Saves huge amount of time on compilations

Comments: Bottom line this tool saves a tremendous amount of time for developers, and also in CI/nightly builds. This translates into increased developer productivity and faster feedback from the CI system.

Pros:

The technology is truly amazing. A Visual Studio build that takes 8 hours to complete, was cut down to 45 minutes just by deploying Incredibuild, before applying any further optimizations and best practices to accelerate the build even more. It also works on our current hardware (workstations and servers) without noticeable impact on performance.

Cons:

The fact that you need a separate license bundle for each technology (C++, C#, make, ...), and also separate license bundles to utilize multi-core machines, can greatly increase the cost of the product in the long run

4 cores package should not exist today...

Comments: Because of this, we are now thinking about no longer using Incredibuild and thus using the full power of our computers. That said, incredibuild is still a great tool if you can afford it or use less powerful computers.

Pros:

Very easy to use and configure. Very useful (and not very expensive with the 4 cores package), with a slow computer park .

Cons:

The 4 cores package limits the use to 4 cores per computer, even on our own computer. When we have more powerful computer (12 and 16 cores in our case), it unfortunately becomes much less interesting to use incredibuild rather than the simple and free parallel build from visual studio. So, the 4 cores package slowed down considerably our daily compilation ; and up for more than 4 cores package is very expensive...

Whoosh splat

Comments: Compile times for Unreal Engine based games.

Pros:

Distributed builds are definitely a huge performance win for being able to iterate on building our product.

Cons:

1. Unfortunately, it can lead to a Jevon's paradox where it is easier to be sloppy about structuring code well to avoid issues that slow down compiles. 2. Initiating XGE builds for tools is done through an executable--there isn't an API to use where you can initiate, monitor, add or remove tasks to distribute along with what is currently being built, or cancel. This level of dynamism would help with multiple builds being initiated by the same PC. 3. There have been stability issues and crashes we have encountered for our builds which seem exacerbated with the number of people working remotely.

Build fast using your free computing power

Comments: Incredibuild are the easiest way without changing your project to dramatically lower your build time, they have good service support and build monitor shows you if you would join more resources that you already have it would build even faster. good integration with all Microsoft tools and also Linux (we're using it for both)

Pros:

The thing I like most about this software is the simplicity to lower dramatically our product build time without using extra resources.

Cons:

The cloud solution is running on your cloud environment (not including IBM Cloud) and it's not fully SAAS.

Fast and easy

Pros:

Incredibuild does a fantastic job of speeding up long builds on both desktops and servers. Setup and integration into existing visual studio projects is very easy.

Cons:

Restrictions on various helper types is a bit of a nuisance. Separate licenses are required depending on the workload being distributed based on tools (c++ vs csharp vs Visual Studio vs Makefile). Nested commands (ie a separate compile process being kicked off in a pre-build step) require upgrading to the much more expensive enterprise edition.

Great software, but missing some metrics gathering options.

Pros:

As the team who setup that software, it is pretty easy to implement and administer. License management is super easy and with the software, you can quickly see everything about the nodes.

Cons:

One thing i would love to see is more metrics on the jobs and other information that the software is doing. Either to expose that to a RestAPI or something that another agent can consume and correlate with other tools (Grafana/ElasticSearch/etc)

Incredibuild fast to compile the source code

Pros:

With the help of this tools I am able to execute my source code too fast. It help me to reduce the build time and delivery of the executable is fast.

Cons:

I want to know is there is any thing which I can setup on Unix platform?

Incredibuild a good way to speed your builds up

Comments: It is a life savior no doubt we'll be looking to distribute the tests next.

Pros:

The distributed compilation of our huge software in C++ helps the entire team focus more on work than compiling. It cuts the compilation time of the software by half which is great for us since the full build can last to up to 4 hours.

Cons:

I would like it to go even faster we have a grid of around 50 machines using incredibuild I wander if we can parallelize more and go even faster.