How to build Chromium faster?

If all you're doing is modifying a few files and rebuilding, ninja will only rebuild the objects that were affected by those files. When you run ninja -C ..., the console displays the number of targets that need to be built. If you're modifying only a few files, that should be ~2000 at the high end (modifying popular header files can touch lots of objects). Modifying a single .cpp would result in rebuilding just that object.

Of course, you still have to relink which can take a very long time. To make linking faster, try using a component build, which keeps everything in separate shared libraries rather than one big onw that needs to be relinked for any change. If you're using GN, add is_component_build=true to gn args out/${build_dir}. For GYP, see this page.

You can also peruse faster linux builds and see if any of those tips apply to you. Unfortunately, Chrome is a massive project so builds will naturally be long. However, once you've done the initial build, incremental builds should be on the order of minutes rather than hours.

Follow the recently updated instructions here:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/windows_build_instructions.md#Faster-builds

In addition to using component builds you can disable nacl, use jumbo builds, turn off symbols for webcore, etc. Jumbo builds are still experimental at this point but they already help build times and they will gradually help more.

Full builds will always take a long time even with jumbo builds, but component builds should let incremental builds be quite fast in many cases.

For building on Linux, you can see how to build faster at: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/linux_build_instructions.md#faster-builds

Most of them require add build argments. To edit build arguments, you can see GN build configuration at: https://www.chromium.org/developers/gn-build-configuration.

You can edit the build arguments on a build directory by:

$ gn args out/mybuild