I'm trying to reduce build times and right now Source Indexing and Symbol Publishing with TFS 2015 takes (~1hr). Maybe indexing sources and publishing symbols is just heavy on disk I/O and bottle-necked there -- I'm unsure. I want sources to continue to be indexed and symbols to continue to be published for this particular build as it makes debugging exponentially easier.
Are there any ways to make source indexing and symbol publishing with TFS 2015 faster?
It's hard to just reduce the time of this task "Source Indexing/Symbol Publishing "
However, there are other ways to reduce the build time：Such as setting clean workspace to none. Changing the workspace setting from recreate a fresh workspace every time to incremental by which it will incrementally download the source to the build workspace only.
During the build process, the build agent compiles and does other work with your source files. Before the build agent can do this work, it downloads the files from folders on your version control server into a local working directory. To facilitate downloading these files, the build agent creates a version control workspace, which maps the folders on the server to the local folders in the working directory for the build agent. If you set clean workspace , it will delete the old files and get down the sources during every triggered build. So set clean workspace to none can reduce the time of the build.
And it's also related to the hardware of your server. Improve the performance of the server will also reduce your build times.