Build Faster

Use a local Sui repo

If you often build, then repeating local file access is obviously faster than remote (and more reliable).

If you use the Rust SDK, replace your Git dependencies with "path".

For Move dependencies replace Git dependencies with "local".

For suibase users, see here to re-use its local repo already downloaded.

Build only what you need

If you care only for the client, then do not build the whole thing.
Do cargo build -p sui instead of cargo build

Parallel Linker

Some build steps are not optimized for parallelism. Notably, you can see this with top on Linux (by pressing 1) and you will see only one core busy while the linker is running.

One trick that may help is the parallel linker Mold.

After installation, you can enable for Rust by creating a config.toml. The following was verified to work for Sui built on Ubuntu:

$ cat ~/.cargo/config.toml
[target.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
rustflags = ["-C", "link-arg=-fuse-ld=mold"]

The performance gain varies widely, you have to try for yourself. Do not expect 10x faster... it accelerates only the link phase. Furthermore, the performance gap versus more recent GNU/LLVM linker release is closing.

How does my build time compare?

See some profiling below.

Measurements are for clean build of sui and sui-faucet only.

Steps for measuring

With suibase, do the following to get one measurement:

$ localnet delete
$ localnet update

If you do not have suibase, then do the following for the first measurements:

$ git clone -b devnet https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui.git
$ cd sui
$ cargo build --bin sui --bin sui-faucet

... and get additional measurements with:

$ cargo clean
$ cargo build --bin sui --bin sui-faucet

Modern Linux

Low : Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 2m 55s
High: Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 2m 55s

Intel i7-13700K (16 Cores), 64 GB, NVMe PCIe 4
Ubuntu 22.10, Sui 0.31.2
Suibase 0.1.2
GCC 12.2 / Mold 1.11

M1 MAX macosx

Low : Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 4m 23
High: Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 4m 24s

Apple M1 Max
macOS Ventura 13.3.1 (22E261), Sui 0.31.2
Suibase 0.1.2
Apple clang version 14.0.3
rustc 1.68.2

Old Server (~2013) Windows 10 WSL2

Low : Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 8m 06s
High: Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 8m 20s

2xIntel Xeon E5-2697v2@2.7GHz(24 Cores), 64 GB, NVMe PCIe 3
WSL2 config: 32 VCore, 48 GB
Ubuntu 22.04, Sui 0.31.2
Suibase 0.1.2
GCC 11.3 / Mold 1.11