Hi,

I was wondering if it could be possible to mark some builds as "special" (maybe with the REST api, at first?) and allow for them to last quite a bit longer than the normal 1h timeout.

The idea would be that for projects that build all of their dependencies from scratch, the first build after changing dependency snapshot takes significantly longer (afterwards the Appveyor cache would bring down the time needed to 3/4 minutes).

In this case, I have a project that takes 18 minutes on Appveyor from scratch, and I tried to enable the split-objs compilation option (it's something like: instead of generating a single object file for every source file, a separate object file is created for every function)... locally on my laptop this doesn't make the build from scratch last much longer (probably 6/7 minutes) but it dramatically shrinks the size of the resulting static binary: from 33MB to 7MB

https://ci.appveyor.com/project/berdario/c-repl/build/1.0.14

A similar problem can happen if you'd want to enable compilation with profiling enabled.

I've seen other threads https://appveyor.tenderapp.com/discussions/problems/3353-timeout-due-to-long-build

The suggestion seems to be to use a different/more powerful appveyor VM to make the build complete faster, but I think that manually increasing the timeout when one wants to prepare the cache for the build would be a more reliable solution.

In the meanwhile I was attempting to remove and slowly re-add dependencies to my project to allow the build to complete and reuse the cache for a second build, but given how difficult it is to estimate how long the build would take on Appveyor, it's annoying to have to guess how long it'll take, and then having to retry from scratch again if the added dependencies turns out to take more than 1h

Thank you