Improve Compile Times in Flex Builder

My relationship with FlexBuilder is definitely love-hate, and frequently includes more hate than love. Making sure it always compiles quickly makes a huge difference in my productivity. Anything over 10 seconds and I start to lose focus. Complex projects quickly get out of hand, and you have to constantly fight to keep compile times down.

Here are some things I have learned (some very recently) to speed things up.

• If your project has more than one application, go to project properties -> Flex applications and remove the ones you aren’t working on. This improved speeds for me by 66%
• Avoid using linked projects. Even with RSLs, these guys slow you down a lot. Any real code libraries should be included as a swc. If you have application code libraries you reuse across projects (so, not a cohesive library, like corelib or degrafa, but just a bunch of classes you reuse), include them as an external source path instead. Go to Project Properties -> Flex Build Path -> Source Path -> Add Folder. Improvement around 50%.
• Turn off Automatic Building. FB seems a lot less laggy when it isn’t compiling constantly.
• If you do have to link projects, use RSL linkage (I don’t know how to do this with Air, anyone figured it out?) .. Improvement around 50%.
• If you need to develop both Web and Air side-by-side, you can put your application code in a folder which you then include via source-path in two projects, one air and one flex. Either that or use this trick.
• Avoid embedded assets. Flex Builder doesn’t do as good of a job as it should optimizing these. Use degrafa instead of images if you can. I haven’t measured this.
• Close any unused projects (right click on them)

That’s all I have for now. I’ll add more as I think of them. What else does everyone do?