Try compiling a small source file that includes a handful of STL headers, and compare to one that doesn’t. Even just including without instantiating any of the templates, the difference is a substantial fraction of a second. That can be a heavy influence, though maybe not in a huge codebase which also has plenty of large headers of its own.

I tried couple of times to workaround the problem you're describing through PCH on some of my ex projects. All of them were on the MM LoC scale and build-from-scratch was taking roughly 45min to 1hr on a developer machine. I never got to make a substantial cut in the build time through PCH, only perhaps by a very few % but YMMV.

Given that modules are PCH in disguise, I don't believe modules are going to have a dramatically bigger, and better, effect on C++ build times. Whether or not they are going to cut the build time from 45 seconds to 30 seconds I also couldn't care less - small projects don't even have the build time problem worth solving. Mid and big projects is where it will really count and if modules are going to have a substantial effect in the range of at least 20-30% in build time cut, I will be all ears.

Yeah, how much modules/PCHs would help probably depends a lot on your code base. I read about clangs work on modules and they seemed a bit uncertain if you'd get much benefit at all once you switch on optimizations. https://clang.llvm.org/docs/StandardCPlusPlusModules.html#ho...