You won't speed anything up by removing comments, dead code, useless vars and such, since the lexical/syntactic analysis isn't slow. What's slow is register allocation and I'm afraid there's usually not much you can do. We're getting into 15-30 minute compile times with our complex DX11 shaders (and we have hundreds) and what sometimes helps (with compile time):
- manually unroll loops (works better (in terms of compilation time) than using [unroll], [fastopt] or whatever compiler hints)
- especially true for nested loops!
- the deeper the called function, the worse
- look for redundant texture sampling which could be pulled up from loops or functions - you'll get cache hit, however it will compile longer

What doesn't help (neither compilation speed nor performance):
- trying to manually optimise ALU operations

I guess most of this will be true for DX9, too.

You won't speed anything up by removing comments, dead code, useless vars and such, since the lexical/syntactic analysis isn't slow. What's slow is register allocation and I'm afraid there's usually not much you can do. We're getting into 15-30 minute compile times with our complex DX11 shaders (and we have hundreds) and what sometimes helps (with compile time):
- manually unroll loops (works better (in terms of compilation time) than using [unroll], [fastopt] or whatever compiler hints)
- especially true for nested loops!
- the deeper the called function, the worse
- look for redundant texture sampling which could be pulled up from loops or functions

What doesn't help (neither compilation speed nor performance):
- trying to manually optimise ALU operations

I guess most of this will be true for DX9, too.

You won't speed anything up by removing comments and such, since the lexical/syntactic analysis isn't slow. What's slow is register allocation and I'm afraid there's usually not much you can do. We're getting into 15-30 minute compile times with our complex DX11 shaders (and we have hundreds) and what sometimes helps (with compile time):
- manually unroll loops (works better (in terms of compilation time) than using [unroll], [fastopt] or whatever compiler hints)
- especially true for nested loops!
- the deeper the called function, the worse
- look for redundant texture sampling which could be pulled up from loops or functions

What doesn't help (neither compilation speed nor performance):
- trying to manually optimise ALU operations

I guess most of this will be true for DX9, too.