sarkarian

I essentially have the same workflow as you, and frankly, more cores AND faster cores are going to help you out a lot.
 
I run a 10900X currently, formerly a 7800X and I saw a pretty decent uptick in performance for my workflow with the switch. I don't think you need to worry about your RAM unless you intend to start using VMs to do your work in like I do though. EDIT: For clarification, what I mean here is that I have different IDE installs and source repos within hyperV instances for my different client organizations.
 
If I didn't already have the X299 platform, I likely would have gone 3900X on an x570 board, and if it were my build I'd definitely migrate to an NVMe device. For the relatively low cost of a 500gb NVMe drive, I'd definitely want to save the few seconds per compile/launch. It seems small, but it adds up, and that might be a few minutes a day extra that I have to do something else. I've even gone so far as having 3 NVMe drives in my system, 1 for my OS and games, 1 for my visual studio install(among other IDEs) and source code, and 1 for my DBs and web server testing environments.

I wish I had your system as my daily driver at work. My work laptop is a Haswell processor with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD. And I can have a quite a few tabs open in FF with sometimes a VM running in the background plus Visual Studio Enterprise with a few plugins. I'm a professional software engineer with over 20 years of experience. And I've worked with Visual Studio for nearly that 20 years, and I work primarily with C++ and C# with a little bit of PowerShell thrown in for good measure.
 
So let's get to the heart of your issue. First, core count and core speed both matter. Visual Studio will use multiple cores to build several files at once where dependencies allow. Memory is your friend here as well, but unless you're building massive projects - one of my solutions at work has over 70 projects in it - your builds are unlikely to run into any kind of memory ceiling. We can happily build the solution I mentioned on a dual-core virtual machine with... 4GB RAM I think.
 
And if you're expecting upgrading to a Ryzen 9 to cut your build times in half because it benchmarks at double the score of your processor, prepare to be sorely disappointed. Things don't work that way. Your CPU, memory, and storage will all play a role. The newer CPU will help, don't get me wrong, but it won't be this spectacular reduction in build times. And there are quite a few reasons for this.
 
On your storage, going with NVMe will help as well, but only so much. If you want an idea of what I'm talking about, copy a ton of small files (like only a few kilobytes each) from one location on your SSD to another and watch the transfer speed. That is what a solution build is doing: opening and reading a ton of small files, and creating a bunch more small files. There is a little bit of a penalty incurred every time a file is opened and closed. The more often this happens, the more often that penalty is incurred, meaning it's incurred more often with smaller files. It's why transferring a bunch of small files from one location to another takes longer than a few large files.
 
Adding more RAM will help, especially since you're running Docker containers on Windows, I presume. (Why?) Which if those Docker containers aren't all that heavy, consider moving those into a Linux VM if they're Linux containers, or if they contain software that can run happily on Linux if those containers are for your projects. They'll require less resources there.
 
So, TL;DR:
 
Yes, the newer CPU will help, but it won't cut your build times in half. It will help spread the load on what you're running. Given all of what you're trying to do, I'd use that alone as the justification for the newer CPU. Yes, more memory will be to your advantage here, especially given what you're trying to do, but it's unlikely to significantly help your build times as well. Yes, NVMe will help, but it's unlikely to be the significant performance boost to your build times that you're hoping for. It will help in a lot of other ways, though, so don't be too focused on your build times. You're likely to get more bang for buck right now by upgrading your storage to NVMe, but keep the SATA SSD as secondary storage. Upgrade memory next - go to 32GB before deciding to go to 64GB.

Hi Guys,
Hello from Sydney!
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I am a software developer by profession, and I am tired of playing mobile games in small screen. I crave the days the Serious Sam, 2nd encounter, COD 1, Company of Heroes, Pirates! , Age of Empires, Wolfenstein  hahaha ..
 
See you all around soon guys.