Building Thunderbird Faster

I’m always looking for ways to speed up my Mozilla build, since it allows me to test my changes even quicker. I was really excited when I found out about make -s tier_app, since it sped up my compiles by a huge amount.

make
real    10m22.630s
user    4m28.072s
sys     1m27.807s

vs.

make -s tier_app
real    0m14.426s
user    0m6.502s
sys     0m3.957s

But yesterday, on IRC, I heard about libs_tier_app, which is ever faster, if you haven’t changed any IDL files (which I usually don’t).

make -s libs_tier_app
real    0m9.407s
user    0m5.440s
sys     0m3.065s

Okay, it’s not nearly as good as going from 10 and a half minutes to 15 seconds, but a 30% (or is it 50%) speedup is still nothing to sneer at.