MSBuild Flame Graph

Explore MSBuild executions to find why your C++ builds are slow.

This is the flame graph for a default Visual Studio 2015 C++ project:

This graph represents a build from this repository.

I wrote about the steps I took to build the initial version of the tool in this post series.

Features

• Uses MSBuild 15: builds VS2015 and VS2017 C++ projects.
• Processes /Bt+ and /time+ MSVC flags:
• Processes /d1reportTime MSVC flag (exclusive to VS2017 projects):
• Builds projects into an Events.json file, converts it into Trace.json in a separate step.
• Can theoretically build other MSBuild-based projects, but is only tested on C++ ones.

Getting started

• Install Visual Studio 2017+ Community Edition.
• Install .NET Framework v4.6.2 SDK.
• Clone repository.
• Open solution, build and run.

Codebase overview

Should you want to explore what's in the repository, these are the main parts:

Projects

• Builder: contains the UI (built in WPF) to interact with the tool.
• MSBuildWrapper: defines MSBuild loggers, interacts with MSBuild API and converts MSBuild events to custom abstractions.
• BuildTimeline: represents timelines and everything it needs, from events to entries.
• TimelineSerializer: includes a way to convert a Timeline to a Google Chrome's trace. New trace formats can be added.
• Model: represents data to be used by other projects.

Main flow

• As part of MSBuildWrapper/Compilation/Compilation.cs, when a build starts every MSBuild event is displayed in the UI and gets stored in memory.
• When the build finishes, most events get converted into a custom format (some events and properties are discarded).
• When the build is finished, Builder/ViewModel/Commands.cs stores every custom event in an Events.json file.
• A Trace.json file can be exported from an Events.json file via Builder/ViewModel/Commands.cs. This is useful to build different timelines (even to different formats) without having to repeat the build.

License

This project is released under GNU GPLv3 license.

I started this project thanks to the information I gathered from the community, so I wanted to give something back. You are encouraged to alter it in any way you want, but please continue making it public so the community can benefit from it.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to @aras_p for his blog posts investigating build times, this one was the main inspiration for this tool.
• Thanks to Microsoft's dev team for building these API and new tools like vcperf or MSBuild Structured Log Viewer.