That doesn't seem particularly surprising. Lots of software is slow when your storage is slow.

You're right that some slowdown is expected, but for me personally I hadn't realized how bad this particular FS was, nor had I expected how much it impacted build times

Wouldn't this be true of any compiler? Do other compilers have optimizations that avoid excess disk usage when on a slow file system?

Yes, I think that's right, but I don't have any data to compare rust to other compilers.

I wouldn't be surprised if Rust/Cargo does more disk IO than other build tools, though. Rust does a lot of compile time code gen and caches a lot of stuff on disk.

FWIW we did this to significantly reduce storage usage

    strip = "debuginfo"

This was a ~20x reduction in size, 279M -> 19M. If you have slow storage it could really help performance (don't recall, personally).

Good hint, thank you. I'm trying this out and I do see an improvement in performance. The ~23 second build now takes about ~14 seconds

Hell yeah! I'm so glad I could help, that's a big win.

FWIW it does break debuggers since you won't have the symbols. Just comment it out when you need a build that has all of that info.