Unfortunately – there’s not much that can be done. ~250 MB of analyzer data needs to be downloaded and there’s no reliable caching mechanism that can be used on Azure DevOps Pipelines like is available on some other CIs.
I have two points to share:
We know downloads take longer when the version of Java used to run the scanner is 14+ (as Pack200 compression is no longer supported). It’s something worth double-checking, although your scanner environment is most likely on Java 11.
Eventually, we would like to do get these resources hosted on a CDN to improve availability. We aren’t there today
Just to have some numbers – how long does the rest of your build/analysis take? We know this is uniquely painful on smaller projects with otherwise short builds.
You say 250 MB of analyzer data ‘needs’ to be downloaded? But when I look at what is being downloaded it has files which are totally irrelevant to our project C# eg Scala, Groovy, flex, cpp etc.
If we had an option to select which data analyzers to download that would reduce the time by 90%+.