Much longer build times from Unity 5.0.2 -> 5.1

Unity Engine
1

We have a very large project and our StandaloneWindows builds with 219 scenes (+ some custom steps, asset bundles, etc) took about 2.5 hours on unity 5.0.2. We just upgraded to Unity 5.1.0f3 and our latest builds are taking 6-7 hours, more than double the time.

We have some logging during the build, and it seems that each scene is just taking longer to build than it did before.

Has anyone else noticed an issue like this? Is there something new in 5.1 where perhaps some option or feature would be enabled by default that could cause this issue? We do not use baked lighting of any kind.

Also, something perhaps worth mentioning is that in the past, we’ve noticed that increased shader variants (more keywords/variations) has a pretty direct effect on per-scene build time. So we’ve worked to reduce that where we can, and this increase we are seeing in 5.1 may not be related, but in case it is, I thought I would mention it.

2

We are having to revert back to 5.0.2 to get our build times under control. I just did this on one of our build machines and the build times are back to normal. There definitely seems to be an issue in 5.1 that is causing this.

3

I’ve now tried 5.1.0p1 and still builds twice as slow as 5.0.2p2… no one else has seen an issue like this?

4

Ah this is strange, My project is around 5gb and I would say it builds faster on 5.1 than it did in previous 5.x.x versions.

build time is around 2 hours, used to be around 2.5 hours on previous versions of unity

5

Thanks for the report… I suppose it could be something on our end that doesn’t interact well with changes in 5.1. Thought I would try bumping this one more time to see if anyone else is seeing this issue.