Yes, linking time does seem to be quite high, certainly when linking our exe.

It begs the question of why don't we have two setups? In debug, we could build dll's which are always loaded at startup but allow easy code changes without relinking. in release we could perhaps see a performance increase by moving to static libs when we don't care about relinking times...

I'm curious and might give it a go on a handful of our larger, more heavily used dll's.