Quartus II Compiler Speed?

can you check which CPU load is measured for quartus.exe (task-manager) ? Perhaps javaw.exe is wasting performance. If so, kill javaw.exe from task list.

Thanks for the hint. I found "quartus_map.exe" uses more than 100 MB Mem, my cheap Dell 2400 has only 128 MB ram. I ordered 512 DDR mem from Dell today.

Yikes! 128MB. That is definately why. Quartus place & route is very processor/memory intensive. It gets progressively worse as you push your design clock speed requirements up and start to fill the chip with logic. The actual place & route operation is too deep for my understanding, but from what I understand Altera employs many talented engineers to get the most out of this.

Installation & Operating Requirements
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Altera recommends the following system configuration:
*  Pentium II 400 with 512-MB system memory (faster systems give
   better software performance)

Yes, 512 MB RAM is the minimum. With 512MB, the "Full featured" design (7371 LEs) finished in 34 min. I noticed that no more swapping btw RAM and HD. The HD light was constant blinking before.

my design ( Cyclone E1C12 / 7700 LE ) lasts 12 minutes with DEll 3GHz / 1GB RAM. Upgrading to 2GB RAM did not speed up the compilation process.

Depends on your settings how long it'll take to compile (128k is far too low though). I can make a design that takes 20 minutes to compile clear an hour if I try to optimize the hardware to gain performance using Quartus settings (optimization isn't free).

Very good suggestions!