performance - What are ways of improving build/compile time?

Question

I am using Visual Studio, and it seems that getting rid of unused references and using statements speeds up my build time on larger projects. Are there other known ways of speeding up build time. What about for other languages and build environments?

What is typically the bottleneck during build/compile? Disk, CPU, Memory?

What is a list of/are good references for distributed builds?

Answer 1

The biggest improvement we made for our large C++ project was from distributing our builds. A couple of years ago, a full build would take about half an hour, while it's now about three minutes, of which one third is link time.

We're using a proprietary build system, but IncrediBuild is working fine for a lot of people (we couldn't get it to work reliably).