In the last month or so, my VS2019 startup has been getting slower and slower. Opening a mind-sized solution (~50 projects) used to take a couple of minutes, now it's taking >15 minutes. Is there a way I can get "behind the scenes" and see what it's doing that's causing the slowness?
Historically, Visual Studio has problem with some browsing databases growing out of control. There was an infamous *.ncb file (Non-Compile Browser?) in VS 6, that periodically needed to be deleted. People wrote plug-ins and macros to "nuke" that file and seamless reload a workspace. Apparently, some issues were preserved for over 20 years.
Modern versions of Visual Studio keep those databases in the hidden .vs folder in your solution directory. You can simply delete this folder, it will be re-created as needed.
Related
ISSUE
While in VS, right-clicking on a file and selecting "Compare" will completely lock up Visual Studio.
The same happens when right-clicking inside the text-area of a file and doing a Compare.
The same happens regardless of file type... I've tried with .js .vb .cs .ascx .css
Attempting to click anything in the UI, including the minimize or close buttons, does absolutely nothing. The buttons don't even highlight to show hover / focus. The only way to close VS is through Task Manager.
Other staff with the same spec laptop as me, same version of programs, and same VS solution... are able to Compare just fine.
SPECS
Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise
Team Foundation Server 2015
Windows 10 Enterprise
16 GB RAM / i7 1.99 GHz processor
TROUBLESHOOTING
I've seen some suggestions of disabling "Identify Helpful Extensions" in Options => Text Editor => HTML => Advanced. No change.
I've restarted the Windows server that TFS is hosted on.
No events are logged in Event Viewer Application or System.
ADDITIONAL NOTES
With a solution already open, VS is currently consuming 0 CPU and between 220 MB and 240 MB of memory. When I attempt to Compare a file with TFS, and TFS immediately becomes frozen, the Memory remains mostly stagnant. Occasionally going up or down a few MB over the course of minutes.
Other staff with the same spec laptop as me, same version of programs,
and same VS solution... are able to Compare just fine.
This should be a client side issue, first try to clear TFS and VS cache.
For TFS2015 Clear TFS caches %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Team Foundation\6.0\Cache
Beside, you could also be able to change the Default Visual Studio Diff Tool . This will narrow down if the freezes visual studio issue is related to build-in compare tool.
How to change, the detail step please refer this blog. If clear cache not work and other tool works well, suggest you re-install your Visual Studio.
You can try closing Visual Studio and deleting %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\x.0\Cache and /or %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\xx.0 directories and/or opening Developer Command prompt and running devenv.exe /resetSettings and/or deleting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0 registry entry (of course, it may be a good idea to back up registry entry prior to deletion)
As others have suggested clearing the TFS and VS cache may fix the problem but doing so may have some negative side effects.
Before attempting a full TFS and VS cache clear you can clear the folder located at C:\Users{Username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation{Version}\Cache
This may limit undesired side effects.
See:
Visual Studio 2013 and TFS - All excluded changes being included back automatically
I have a solution with several projects. Loading this solution takes usually not more than 1 min. However few days ago, time of loading the solution increase to several minutes. I have try to do some thing which I found on the Internet:
-disable all add-ins
-clear all suo files.
-clear list of recent projects.
But this do not work. I install the ProcessMonitor and I noticed that during loading my solution devenv make huge amount of request to files placed in: C:\Patches\Default\devenv.exe and C:\Patches\NativeImage\devenv.exe is this correct? Any ideas what can be wrong?
I have a quite similar problem with visual studio 2015, lots of files created under random folder and slowing down visual studio ... but I found out it was not visual studio
Process seemed to be devenv.exe however the files are created because I used fusion log viewer to troubleshoot assembly loading , and forgot to stop logging.
how to fix: open fuslogvw as admin, and disable logging
We have a really big solution with more than 200 projects and thousands of files. Despite of that the solution used to load pretty quickly in Visual Studio 2010 as well as 2012. However, after copying the whole SVN repository to another location, loading and closing the solution suddenly took extreeeemly long. (I am talking about 30-60 minutes here!)
I found a solution myself and I wanted to share it here, hoping that it might save someone quite a few hours of research and staring at the "Preparing solution..." dialog.
When inspecting the devenv.exe process with Process Monitor, I found out that it is pretty busy with accessing the .svn directory. Here is what I did (and this somehow solved the problem):
Kill Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
Disable AnkhSvn as Source Control plugin (Tools->Options->Source Control->Plug-in Selection->None)
Disable "Document Well 2010 Plus" (VS2010) or "Custom Document Well" (VS2012) in Productivity Power Tools (Tools->Options->Productivity Power Tools) - I read that somewhere and it might have helped as well...
Close Visual Studio
Delete the solution's *.suo file. This is located in the same folder as the solution itself. NOTE: You will lose several settings for your solution, like currently opened files, breakpoints, bookmarks, current solution configuration & platform (e.g. Debug x86) etc.
Restart Visual Studio
Load the solution - it was much faster now!
Close Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
Re-enable AnkhSvn and the "Document Well"
Restart Visual Studio
Open the solution - it was still loaded in seconds!
I do not know which of these steps actually solved the problem. Probably, not all these steps are required, but I did not want to reproduce the problem to find out which steps may be omitted. :)
None of those helped me, what I did... I watch with ProcMon of sysinternals, filtering for devenv, and I saw a lot of entries of fussionlog. I had enabled fussionlog for debugging purposes some weeks before and didn't think in disabling it. I just had to disable fussionlog and the solution opened faster.
You can open the Visual Studio in the Safe Mode, and then check your plugin and source control settings after opening the project.
Safe Mode means "Starts Visual Studio, loading only the default environment and services."
How :
devenv /SafeMode
Or according to your path
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /SafeMode
source : https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241278.aspx
In my case, the following worked without any of the intervening steps suggested:
Kill Visual Studio.
Start Visual Studio directly (i.e., not from the .sln file).
Then, from within Visual Studio, open the solution.
In my case this was all it took to make the problem solution load quite quickly, without the need for me to change any settings or delete any files.
fwiw, I realize this is a late entry, but I found that simply removing (deleting) my large number of breakpoints resolved the excessive load time and compile time.
This action reduced the size of the .suo file from 214MB to 977KB. Let VS handle the .suo file itself.
Compiling and loading now takes < 1 minute instead of 5-10 minutes for a solution with 35 projects. Visual Studio 2012 Pro, update 4.
None of the other answers worked for me. CI compile times were fine, but loading my solution in Visual Studio was taking almost two minutes. VS would then operate just fine until I closed and opened the solution the next time. Different versions of VS all showed the same problem and both safe mode and deleting the suo didn't help.
I ended up following the advice in http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2014/04/30/156156.aspx to use Windows Performance Recorder to instrument VS and find the problem. By looking in Windows Performance Analyzer under the "CPU Usage (Sampled)" section and adding the "Stack (Frame Tags)" column, I was able to dig into the usage of devenv.exe.
Turns out the hot path by count had Microsoft.VisualStudio.Platform.WindowManagement.ni.dll 23 calls down, and below that eventually Microsoft.VisualStudio.ServerExplorer.dll and Microsoft.VisualStudio.Data.Package.dll. That pointed me to look in Server Explorer in the UI and open the Data Connections tab. There I found hundreds of mistakenly added connections that came from the debug web.config's ConnectionString section. Removing those from web.config reduced the load of that individual project from 90+ seconds to almost instant.
I have a different cause for the slow loading of the projects.
My situation is utilizing Git and found that even switching branches was slower than it should be with project load.
Solution: Run Visual Studio as Administrator
Reason: Something with the Corporate laptop is not providing the needed Git tool access (it doesn't recognize that a git repository is in use).
I have not seen any issues with Git or my personal access to any of the project files or Git objects.
I tried the above, but it didn't solve my problem.
Here's how I got around this problem, hopefully it will work for some of you as well:
Open Visual Studio 2013 with no solution.
Create a new C# Console application and save it.
Close Visual Studio.
Reopen the Console solution created in step 2.
Close Visual Studio.
Reopen the solution that was previously hanging on the Preparing Solution dialogue. Mine opened right away, no more hanging.
Using Visual Studio 2015, I ended up creating a new solution, adding the existing projects.
Deleting the *.suo from gehho's answer helped in the past, but didn't help me in this case. There's also another .suo file in a hidden .vs folder at the root of the solution.
There are other answers here for Visual Studio 2015 Visual Studio 2015 is extremely slow
For my case it was due to TFS issue. It thinks that there are more than 5000 pending changes.
The fix is to force TFS to recheck. Go to Team Explorer -> Source Control Explorer and do "Get Latest" on the projects that have pending changes. For things that are already matching TFS, Visual Studio will actually not download anything to your PC. For things that are different with TFS, Visual Studio will let you know and ask you to reconcile the difference.
This is VS 2019 Professional.
In my case there were <import ...> entries in the project files that pointed to
paths no longer available making the loading of the solution hang indefinitely without any form of information give (Shame on Microsoft!).
I encountered this problem only recently (Mar 2021), using VS 2019. It literarily takes 30+ seconds to load the file (each).
It only effects the Layout files. I believe it could be to do with the links within the files. I have not had time to investigate them.
However, I am writing this to suggest that regardless of the cause of the problem, a simple solution is to right click on the file and open it with Notepad to get your work done.
I'm experiencing some performance problems. When I edit a file, Visual Studio 2008 performs a background (on-the-fly) compilation and then, it updates the error list. During this time, the cursor in the file editor disappears, and the keys I press to move or type more character are buffered.
Once the background compilation is finished, the changes are reflected in the editor (1 - 2 seconds). Every time I edit a file, which happens often, this happens.
How can I fix this problem? If this is not possible, can I disable this automatic build?
I had an odd performance-related issue today. My Microsoft Visual Studio seemed to be taking far too long to perform even the simplest of operations. I Googled around and tried a few ideas that people had such as disabling add-ins or clearing Visual Studio’s recent projects list but those suggestions didn’t seem to solve the problem. I remembered that the Windows SysInternals website had a tool called Process Monitor that would sniff registry and file accesses by any running program.
It seemed to me that Visual Studio was up to something and Process Monitor should help me figure out what it was. I downloaded the most recent version, and after fiddling around a bit with its display filters, ran it and to my horror, I saw that Visual Studio was so slow because it was accessing the more than 10,000 folders in C:\Users\krintoul\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache on most IDE operations. I’m not sure why there were that many folders and moreover, wasn’t sure what Visual Studio was doing with them, but after I zipped those folders up and moved them somewhere else, Visual Studio’s performance improved tremendously.
The Windows SysInternals website has a number of other useful utilities for network management, security, system information and more. Check it out. I’m sure you’ll find something of value.
My visual studio 2010 crashed when some carelessness [bit of madness] mistakenly pressed start button and my Acer timeline got unstable. Two projects where open at the time, one in visual studio 2005 [I have both 2005 and 2010 installed]. Unfortunately I lost all the codes I had done at the time along with those coded even weeks before. Now the project files in both the solutions are those weeks older. Amazingly, the .aspx pages are intact and .cs files are gone.
What can be done to get the lost data? Help please.
Thanks.
Guys TAKE CARE if your Visual Studio crashes, you need to check the backup BEFORE you restart Visual Studio and check if your files are ok! Many people complain that they lost work after a crash, and then they restart Visual Studio, and upon discovering that their code cannot be found in Visual Studio they then check the backup at the location
%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Backup Files\\
The order is important. Check the backup FIRST, before restarting Visual Studio. If you start Visual Studio and then open your old project it's probable that Visual Studio will overwrite the backup files for that project.
Securing the backup is your FIRST concern. Then start Visual Studio and open your project to see how much damage there is.
You can check:
C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Backup Files\<ProjectName>\
C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Backup Files\<ProjectName>\
More information can be found here:
Visual Studio 2010 AutoRecover Feature
I just had the same experience -- losing a source file during a BSOD. Very annoying!
No backup file could be found, and I searched the hard drive for a file containing the class name, but no backup was unturned.
However I was able to get back something resembling my code by decompiling a DLL from the bin/Debug folder using DotPeek. So if you had previously compiled your code successfully, you can get the code (without comments, and with some weird local variable names, etc) via decompilation.
I Had the same problem, I lost code due to BSOD.
the backup folder should store files not saved until they are saved whenever you save the files there are deleted.
I think that maybe they don't remain after a restart as it was empty in my case.
A very good file recovery tool is Recuva. It helped me once, didn't help me second time, though, because I noticed the data loss too late, and all recoverable data got overwritten.
So I used DotPeek, though you'll have to do a lot of work on the disassembled files, they are pretty weird.
Now I put my source tree in Google Drive, because it has file versions and keeps deleted files. Dropbox would do, too.
Git or any other VCS are not solution for this thing, because you cannot have crazy amount of meaningless commits.