How to Reduce NuGet Restore Time of UWP Apps

Kurt von Laven 1

Is there any way to slim down the size of the Microsoft.NETCore.UniversalWindowsPlatform NuGet package (e.g., better compression or only pull down the portions we use in our app)? It is about 2.64 GB, and restoring it every time even from a local cache significantly increases our build times.

Roy Li - MSFT 31,766 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-04-29T06:33:47.137+00:00

Could you please tell me how did you find the size of the nugget package? And does it makes your app a very large size when you packaged it?
Kurt von Laven 1 Reputation point

2021-04-30T15:30:40.297+00:00

I secondary clicked on the appropriate directory in File Explorer and then selected Properties. I am referring specifically to the global-packages location. I have read online that UWP apps tend be very large when packaged but that the user doesn't have to re-download the necessary UWP libraries for each and every UWP app, so in practice this only affects developers. My immediate concern is not the package size, but the time it takes to download 2.64 GB in CI.
Roy Li - MSFT 31,766 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-05-12T01:09:50.693+00:00

Do you mean the Visual Studio will download 2.64GB every time when building your app?
Kurt von Laven 1 Reputation point

2021-05-13T07:08:55.513+00:00

No, sorry. CI stands for Continuous Integration. In CI we restore NuGet packages using msbuild, which isn't so different from what Visual Studio does, but in CI one is typically starting from a fresh image for each and every build to ensure reproducibility. Our CI pipeline has these packages cached, but we still spend a very high percentage of each build just waiting for these 1.3 GB to download to the image. I should clarify that the NuGet packages themselves are 2.64 GB, but I have since realized that our CI pipeline automatically compresses the cache down to 1.3 GB. For comparison, it's pretty typical to have only 20-200MB of dependencies in a Node.js project, which is what got me wondering whether there was any way to only download the pieces of Microsoft.NETCore.UniversalWindowsPlatform that we need (or some other build performance optimization).