We are a team that develops a C/C++/Fortran/Binary compiler project called ROSE and we want to serialize the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). This AST has 436 different custom class types and uses maps, sets, vectors, lists and hash maps. These classes have about 1229 different variables. For convenience reasons we wanted to serialize the AST using boost::serialize, but we have some compiler performance problems. Currently the compilation takes (GCC 4.1.2) -48 minutes to compile and link a program that takes seconds to compile without serialization -The resulting binary goes from <1MB to 122 MB in size. -The compilation uses 2 GB of RAM -The object file contains 98075 symbols with serialization and 41 without If the templates for loading the AST is not instantiated the instantiated templates for saving the AST takes about - 19 minutes to compile and link - The resulting binary goes from <1MB to 77MB - The compilation uses 1.1GB of RAM We have our own custom serialization mechanism that is not that easy to support, but it does not visibly increa My machine is a 2.66 Ghz Quad Core Xeon 5355, 16 GB RAM and 2 TB of striped storage. Is there any trick I can use to reduce the compilation time? When the compilation time is 48 minutes boost::serialization is unfortunately not an option for us although it is a great tool at runtime. thanks, Andreas