KiCad

Source build times

Asked by Oliver

Hi All,

I am dipping my toe in the waters of contributing to the KiCAD source. I've got it compiling successfully (Windows) but I'm finding that the build time is very long (1-2hr to build)!

This is the case even after making minimal changes.

I'm just running 'make' as per the documentation. Is this something that is common and there is a way of speeding up build times?

Thanks :)

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Wayne Stambaugh
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Best Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw) said : 		#1

Assuming you are using msys2, you can speed things up by running `make -j # ` where # is the number threads. The optimal number of threads to use will depend on your system. I have a core i7 so I use 'make -j 8` when building KiCad. That being said, building KiCad on msys2 is slow because msys2 is attempting to emulate a posix like system on windows for the KiCad build tools. Build times on Linux are roughly half that of building on windows. Please keep in mind that KiCad is very large program so even on very fast systems with lots of memory, it's going to take a while to build.

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Oliver (schrodingersgat) said : 		#2

Thanks for that Wayne, makes sense. I'll try the -j flag :)

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Oliver (schrodingersgat) said : 		#3

Thanks Wayne Stambaugh, that solved my question.