My situation
In the C# project I am now working on we have a fairly big solution (80+ projects). Now rebuild times of 5 minutes+ are really becoming qui
MSBuild build time is a multi-dimensional problem. The good news that it is easy to solve:
Unlike most of the processes running on the build machine, build processes are notorious for being CPU, RAM and I/O -consuming. A general recipe for speeding up MSBuild builds is "get best machine money can buy", particularly:
CPU - at least two Intel 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo.
RAM - at least 4 GB DDR3. If this is a developer and build machine, a 64-bit OS and 8 GB RAM is a better option.
HDD - The fastest options is a high-end 3ware RAID-1 with an on-board battery and an enabled write cache. A fast SSD may be another option to consider.
Network - minimum 1 Gbit/s card.
This simple hardware optimization can speed up your MSBuilds 2-3 times.