Speeding Up the Build

When compiling large Help files, or when compiling many Help files using a batch file or make file, the build can take several hours. This is often true even if you have a fast machine, large hard disk, and plenty of memory. Although you cannot completely avoid slow compile times with large Help projects, you can do a few things to achieve faster builds.

nIf possible, compile without compression or use medium compression.

The Help file will build fastest when no compression is used. Using the Compress=high option can require 4 to 10 times as long to build as uncompressed files, depending on the content. Another option is to use medium compression. The difference in size between high and medium compression is small, but the build is a lot faster with medium compression.

nCompile the Help file on an OS/2 machine with HPFS.

OS/2’s high-performance file system (HPFS) is much faster than the MS-DOS file allocation table (FAT). If you have a machine that you can configure with OS/2, you might try doing some performance tests to see if your Help file builds faster under OS/2.

nCreate a RAM drive and use it to build the Help file.

If your Help file is not too large and you have sufficient memory in your build machine, you can use a RAM drive to build your Help file. For this method to work, the RAM drive should be roughly two and one-half times larger than the Help file you are building. For example, if the Help file is about 2 MB, the RAM drive should be at least 5 MB.

nDivide the Help file into separate topic files, and then build and test these files independently.

The easiest way to compile individual files separately is by editing the Help project file and commenting out lines in the [FILES] section for topic files you don’t want included. To comment out a line, insert a semicolon (;) at the beginning of the line. Remember, however, that if you comment out particular topic files that contain hot spots referencing excluded topics, the compiler will display warnings as the Help file builds. You can also use the View Topic, View Selection, and View File commands in the Help Authoring Templates (WHAT30.DOT or WHAT31.DOT) to perform partial builds.