title: why doesn't Visual Studio 2010 (msbuild?) build faster?
body: <p>Oftentimes when building a large solution with many projects in Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7 Resource Monitor will show that devenv.exe as Not Responding, however Average CPU reads a low number like 0.91 like shown:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/DSV3M.png" alt="Visual Studio 2010 slow build on AMD Phenom II x4"></p>
  
  <p>and this is on Windows 7 x64 with a AMD Phenom II 920 4-core CPU, 8 GB RAM. Visual Studio is not responding, yet it hardly seems to be using any CPU resources.</p>
  
  <p>When I tried running the build with msbuild.exe and the switch "<a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb651793.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">/maxcpucount:4</a>", the Average CPU value still stays low, and the RHS graphs never show a value above 5-10%.</p>
  
  <p>Why doesn't Visual Studio 2010 (or msbuild) seem to be taking advantage of the CPU(s) during a build? </p>