Speeding up build times in ASP.NET

Question

I am currently involved in a ASP.NET project with about 40 projects in the solution. We are doing all our development in cloned Virtual PC environments so all developers hav

Answer 1

And here is another tip to speed up build times with ASP.NET:

• If you have enough memory, create a RamDisk and point your ASP.NET Temporary Files to this ram-based disk. Check this blog post for more details on how to speed up the build time of ASP.NET projects with RamDisk: http://www.wagnerdanda.me/2009/11/speeding-up-build-times-in-asp-net-with-ramdisk/

Hope it helps!

Wagner Danda da Silva

Answer 2

Have you tried tuning up virtual PC?

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Tuning-Virtual-PC-Performance.html

Old article but the gist is still correct.

I found, in a similar situation, that having a separate hard disk for the VPC disk images sped up performance remarkably especially when removing some of the throttling.

Maybe the problem isn't Visual Studio, it's just the fact that compilation is resource intensive.

Answer 3

You might also consider switching to VMware Workstation, which does utilize multiple processors. I'm currently using a setup with two two-processor VMs, and all four do get used.

Answer 4

Do not put so many projects in your solutions. Only create a new project when the code is run in a different process or on a different machine. There is no use to create so many projects in most cases. The number of projects is the most significant slow down in msbuild.

Answer 5

Do you need to rebuild all 40 projects every time.

You can configure what gets built in the Solution Configuration settings.

I.e. if you're changes are only in your WebUI Project, and the other 39 projects are unchanged, you can create a build configuration where only your web application is rebuilt.

• Look at the Configuration Drop Down
• Click "Configuration Manager"
• In the "Active Solution Configuration" drop down click "New"
• Create a new Config copied from the Debug Configuration
• In your new Configuration, uncheck all project builds except the ones you've made changes in

Answer 6

You didn't mention your Visual Studio version, but if it's 2005 you might want to consider an upgrade to 2008. In my case this decreased build time on a largish (30+ projects) solution.

Another option it to pre-build a number of libraries that do not change anymore and reference the compiled dll's in stead of the projects.