MSBuild 4 Detailed Build Summary

Introduction

When we were developing the current version of MSBuild, we spent a lot of time analyzing builds to determine where our performance issues lay. The standard logging, even on diagnostic verbosity and with the performance summary enabled (/clp:PerformanceSummary=true on the MSBuild command line) doesn’t give us the kind of information we desired. What we were looking for was a quick way to visualize which projects depended on which other projects, how much time they were taking, and how MSBuild was allocating the work to its worker nodes. Enter the Detailed Build Summary.
A Word About Nodes

Before looking at these graphs, it is important to understand how MSBuild performs its work. When a project is being built, all of its tasks are executed on a worker node. There is always at least one node, present in the MSBuild executable launched from the command line or inside the Visual Studio IDE. This is referred to as the in-proc node. There may be additional nodes created out-of-proc, and are called the out-of-proc or multi-proc nodes. In the case where MSBuild has more projects to build than currently existing nodes, it will create new worker nodes up to the limit specified by the /m switch.

Each node may have any number of projects assigned to it, but only one project at a time will be executing tasks (though there an exception with the Yield mechanism which I won’t get in to here.)

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