title: Visual Studio 2010 C++ linker performance for large projects
body: <p>At my company we're still using Visual Studio 2005, but are peeking at Visual Studio 2010 in the hope that it will speed up some parts of our development cycle. At the moment we're most interested in the performance of the C++ linker of Visual Studio 2010. When building our application, we're looking at link times between 40 seconds and 2 minutes, depending on machine configuration (SSD vs HDD) and if stuff is already in Windows' disk cache. A simple test where we use the VS2010 linker instead of the VS2005 linker showed an improvement of about 25%. We were hoping to see a much much bigger improvement because we thought that the linker would now be able to make use of multiple cores.</p>
  
  <p>Is this 25% really the improvement that we should expect when switching to VS2010, or are there some magic linker switches that reduce link times to acceptable levels?</p>