SQL Server 2008 :: Left Joins And Query Plan Compile Times

We have a view with many left joins. The original creators of this view might have been lazy or sloppy, I don't know. I have rewritten the query to proper inner joins where required and also nested left joins.

So rather then the following exemplary fragment

select <many items>
from A
left join B on B.id_A = A.id
left join C on C.id_B = B.idthis now looks like
select <many items>
from A
left join (B
join C on C.id_B = B.id
) on B.id_A = A.id

Compilation time of the original view was 18s, of the new rewritten view 4s. The performance of execution is also better (not counting the compile of course). The results of the query are identical. There are about 30 left joins in the original view.

I can imagine that the optimizer has difficulty with all these left joins. But 14s is quite a big difference. I haven't looked into detail in the execution plans yet. I noticed that in both cases the Reason for Early Termination of Statement Optimization was Time Out.