We are seeing some performance issues in my shop with FinalBuilder and Ant builds. I have an Ant build that takes about 3 minutes on my local PC running Ant from the command line. When I run that same Ant build in FinalBuilder on my local system the build takes about 6 minutes. I have set the Ant priority to above normal. When I run the same FinalBuilder script that runs the Ant build on FinalBuilder server the build takes about 9 to 12 minutes. The server is a VM running windows XP(running on a VMWare farm). It has two processors allocated to it with 4gig memory. This Ant build builds a Visual Studio 6 project and a Visual Studio 2008 project. We have another large Ant build that takes 30 minutes from a command prompt and 2.5 hours on the server! Can you help me understand what might effect the performance of Ant builds? I have seen several posts concerning performance but not sure there was a resolution posted for any of them.
My guess is the difference is in the logging. FinalBuilder logs via an embedded database engine (it’s a rich log, with the project hierarchy intact), whilst ant is logging to a flat file or just the console (depending on which options you give it. If you are running it from the FinalBuilder IDE then make sure you turn off Live Logging (on the log view) as that can be a real performance and memory hog. The better option is to use FBCMD.exe to run the project. You could also try turning down the logging level in the ant action to reduce the amount of information written to the log. Lastly, try bypassing ant altogether and add the actions in FB to run VS6 and 2008.
Thanks for your suggestions. In the IDE I already have live logging turned off. If I understand correctly, the server spawns FBCMD.exe to run the build. I tried to run the build locally by running FBCMD and it does run faster than from the IDE but not by much. I’m afraid that bypassing ant is not really an option for us as our ant scripts are pretty lengthy. I realize FB will do everything we do in our ant scripts but ant came first and all of our formal procedures are based on ant scripts. I actually on have one FB script that we use to run all of our ant builds. I use variables to pass in file names, target locations, project names, version labels etc. that is required. We use FB in our formal release procedures to ensure that all builds dependencies have been defined in the build and the build can be reproduced in a clean environment. We are using the latest versions of FB and server, also latest version of ANT. In the logging properties of the ANT task we have no options checked. If I check suppress logging it shortens the build time on my local box. However, it had no effect when running the same build on our server.