If you have taken the time to set up SPFx builds (CI / CD) in Azure DevOps pipelines, you should take a look at which agent pool you are using. I had always heard that Ubuntu was significantly faster and the rumors are in fact true. I found that Ubuntu cut my build times in half. Take a look at the screenshot below.
In my example, build times went from 8m 34s to 4m 23s. That’s a lot faster. If that still seems a bit high, we build two SPFx projects with this job.
Switching your hosted agent pool
If you have configured your pipeline using a YAML file, you can change to a Ubuntu agent pool pretty easily. Just change the vmImage parameter to ‘ubuntu-latest’. If you don’t have a pool or vmImage line in your YAML file, you may have a queue line instead. Remove it and replace with the following snippet:
pool:
vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'
You can view all of the options available for hosted agent pools at this link. If you are doing automated build with Azure DevOps, have you already made this change? If you do make the change, try it out and let me know if you get a performance gain.
Corey Roth's Blog 