How to improve link performance for a large C++ application in VS2005

Question

We have fairly large C++ application which is composed of about 60 projects in Visual Studio 2005. It currently takes 7 minutes to link in Release mode and I would like to t

Answer 1

If you're using the /GL flag to enable Whole Program Optimization (WPO) or the /LTCG flag to enable Link Time Code Generation, turning them off will improve link times significantly, at the expense of some optimizations.

Also, if you're using the /Z7 flag to put debug symbols in the .obj files, your static libraries are probably huge. Using /Zi to create separate .pdb files might help if it prevents the linker from reading all of the debug symbols from disk. I'm not sure if it actually does help because I have not benchmarked it.