Speeding up the Dojo Build

Question

We are running a build of our application using Dojo 1.9 and the build itself is taking an inordinate amount of time to complete. Somewhere along the lines of 10-15 minutes.

Our application is not huge by any means. Maybe 150K LOC. Nothing fancy. Furthermore, when running this build locally using Node, it takes less than a minute.

However, we run the build on a RHEL server with plenty of space and memory, using Rhino. In addition, the tasks are invoked through Ant.

We also use Shrinksafe as the compression mechanism, which could also be the problem. It seems like Shrinksafe is compressing the entire Dojo library (which is enormous) each time the build runs, which seems silly.

Is there anything we can do to speed this up? Or anything we're doing wrong?

Answer 1

Yes, that is inordinate. I have never seen a build take so long, even on an Atom CPU.

In addition to the prior suggestion to use Node.js and not Rhino (by far the biggest killer of build performance), if all of your code has been correctly bundled into layers, you can set optimize to empty string (don’t optimize) and layerOptimize to "closure" (Closure Compiler) in your build profile so only the layers will be run through the optimizer.

Other than that, you should make sure that there isn’t something wrong with the system you are running the build on. (Build files are on NAS with a slow link? Busted CPU fan forcing CPUs to underclock? Ancient CPU with only a single core? Insufficient/bad RAM? Someone else decided to install a TF2 server on it and didn’t tell you?)