Description

When building a project:

• If a target is skipped due to a condition during the project's build, and
• Other projects depend on this target (commonly an initial target)

This situation can cause delays in the build process for dependent projects.

Symptoms

• Significant variance in build times between builds.
• MSBuild tasks show inconsistent performance between builds.
• When switching to graph build mode, MSBuild tasks take considerably longer to resolve than expected (they should normally resolve almost immediately).

Technical details

When the initial target of a project (or another target necessary for a dependent project's build) is skipped due to a condition:
-The ResultsCache does not resolve this target in the main node when the build results are requested by a dependent project.
-Instead, the project is rescheduled to build the skipped target again. It waits in the queue for a build node, and if the condition still evaluates to false, the node resolves the target immediately with the same "skipped" result.
-If the build node is occupied, this can lead to delays in the overall build process.
For more details, refer to #11637.

Fix

To address this issue:

1. Check for conditional targets on which dependent projects rely (e.g., conditional initial targets).
2. If such targets are found, consider:
   • Removing the condition, or
   • Removing the dependency link from this target.