At our company our link times have grown to twenty minutes for a debug build. As we are getting near the end of the project and we have less and less time this is not acceptable and we need to find a solution.

About our project layout:
- One solution
- links to 37 of our internal static libraries
- each static library has on average 20ish C++ files.
- native c++ code only

The problem is certainly linking with debug symbols. If we link without debug symbols then we can link in a few seconds but when we add debug symbols back to the linker option we get to 20 minutes.

If there is no solution to speed up the time I'd like to try and re-architecture our code base to avoid problematic code. For example, my guess is that certain templated classes that get used a lot through out are the culprit. My reasoning for this is that half of our code base does not use templates and linking to this is very fast, and the other half does use it and it links very slowly.

Does anyone know a way to determine what makes it link slowly? I need to find exactly which are the biggest classes to refactor. I need to be sure that this would help link times before I invest a week into the refactor since time is crucial at this point in the project.