Sample Results for Multi-module project (Mar. 2017)

Compile and Tests, single-module project, 4 CPU laptop, as measured by GNU time. The value shown is the real (wall clock) time spend on the process, and the user-space CPU time (sum over all CPUs). The system-space CPU time was negligeable. The code was 16 submodules with 10 long running tests each. 16 submodules were chosen as a number sufficiently larger than the number of CPUs.

Clean build from scratch

Rebuild without changes

Rebuild after change in one module

What is visible here is some projects can do incremental builds, while others rebuild all modules.