Can we speed up sandcastle?

Question

We make use of sandcastle (and SHFB) to generate class library documentation from inline XML comments. It's a great tool to maintain complete and professional looking reference + overview documentation, including correct code samples.

Unfortunately, it's also dog slow. It's by far the most time consuming step of our automated build, and it's starting to hurt. Is there any way to speed it up?

Answer 1

The discussion group over at CodePlex is pretty active and knowledgable. Here's a semi on topic post (no help though): http://sandcastle.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=32267

Answer 2

I just tested building to a RAM disk. In my test case this shaves only about 10% of the build time.

Apparently the sandcastle build process is mostly CPU bound, and it doesn't use more than one core :-(

Answer 3

If you have SdkLinkType=Msdn (see properties of your SHFB project) sandcastle connects to MSDN documentation using web service. That may slooowww build down in case of connection troubles. You may try to set SdkLinkType=None to turn off building MSDN links (in that case you will not have links to MSDN in your help). In my case that improved my build time 5 times (2 minutes instead of 10 minutes).