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That's not what AQtime does. Vtune is essentially analogous to AQtime but far more capable. You aren't going to find this magic solution that you want, whereby you wave a magic wand and your program is suddenly much faster. Optimisation though is going to take effort from you to understand your program. No shortcuts.

I wonder whether the Unit Dependency graph in PasDoc or the Project Dependencies expert in GExperts might be of any help here. They both contain the required information, but possibly not in a helpful format. Maybe they could be improved to become more helpful.

One of the issues is that in a large project with many circular references, that log will show modules appearing again and again. In one large project, I found over 20,000 such references, and a cold build was up to eight minutes. Reducing the circular references by about 25% brought the build time down to about a minute. And the time was stable over several builds in a session, where with 20K+ it had been increasing on successive builds. MMX does produce a report of circularity chains. It is large, and not friendly to humans, but it is easy to parse, and I built a simple tool which delivers in a grid the counts for each of the modules with circular references, and which can compare two reports, which is useful as you continue to work on the project.

There can be exceptional cases which justify sparing use of circular dependencies. Donald Knuth makes the point with regard to sorting algorithms. @Stefan Glienke has also argued for such cases. My point, and what @Uwe Raabe was speaking very explicitly about is large programs where circularity is commonplace, and not at all exceptional. There is no rational case which can support that practice. In the majority of cases, circular references are needed because of badly organized code modules. And I say that based on thousands of modules and millions of lines of code, over a period of 15+ years.

I guess going back to the feature set of Turbo Pascal 3 would also improve the stability of the IDE and the compile speed [/sarcasm]

Relying on unit scope names also makes the compiling slower. Besides MMX there is also UsesCleaner as its command line companion resolving these issues.

Avoiding circular unit references speeds up compilation significantly. Let me cite @Bill Meyer in his excellent book Delphi Legacy Projects : Strategies and Survival Guide: As slower compile times also affect the IDE, especially Code Insight, we are not just talking about longer build times, but responsiveness of the IDE itself. Also mentioned in the book and backed by my own experience and involvement, a very helpful tool is the Unit Dependency Analyzer built in MMX Code Explorer (also available as standalone). Bill dedicates a whole chapter in his book on Cleaning Uses Clauses.