Dear all,

Over the past few days, we’ve been running multiple SONiC builds as part of the SCOMB effort, and I spent some time stress testing the build process.

A few quick observations:

• The best speedup so far was with 16 parallel jobs
• Build time was approximately 3 hours
• A completely fresh build (no cached/pre-sourced images) takes around ~5 hours

Even with these optimizations, a build time of ~3 hours is not practical for day-to-day development, particularly when multiple users are iterating on builds. To support a more collaborative and efficient workflow, this needs to be reduced further.

From what I’ve seen so far:

• There are likely redundant packages and images in the build
• Not everything included seems necessary for a basic or iterative build

So a first step could be:

• Reviewing dependencies more critically
• Stripping down the build to only what’s actually required

That said, this is just an initial direction. There are likely better approaches (e.g., caching strategies, registry mirroring, incremental builds), so it would be great to get more input.

If you have suggestions, please share them here:
https://gitlab.com/alasca.cloud/scomb/sonic-buildimage/-/work_items/18

Also, feel free to pick up any open tickets if something looks interesting.

Best regards,
Rankan Sen