I must work with a Visual Studio (2017) Solution that contains 654 projects, and counting. The projects are a mixture of C++ and C# projects - possibly 2/3 C++.
The problem is, VS2017 (we're already running 15.8) is highly unstable at this project count, but for some tasks I need to open the whole solution.
One can (and should) question the design, but please not here. Are there any viable tricks to make working with such a sln bearable?
The problems we have is:
After having fully loaded, it's sluggish as hell, even on our beefy dev machines. Hangs often.
It will crash many times a day. (We isolated a few cases that reliably crash it, like oping the C++ setting dialog, but it's still unstable).
Crashes are often observed when VS peaks at ~ 2.6GB RAM
Not Problems:
Solution load times: The solution is loaded in a decent amount of time. We don't need to optimize for this at the moment.
Compilation times: Devs don't do full-solution builds anyway. (But some tasks require having your corner in the full context of the whole solution.)
I already tried disabling VS Intellisense, but it didn't help. Disabling our VisualAssistX plugin also didn't really help.
Historically the VS team has always said that they're going to fix the problem of VS loading too much at some indefinite point in time. That's one reason why they
haven't made it 64-bit yet as well. Now that they've disabled the selective loading API, you're pretty much on their mercy.
For older VS versions, there's Funnel.
It allows you to selectively load a subset of the projects, automatically loading dependencies. The added benefit is that refactoring, search etc. only works in context of loaded projects, making it much faster. You can also save and organize your filters, making it easier to switch between different subsets.
I have been suffering from the all too common 'Waiting for a background operation to complete...' message in Visual Studio 2012 (Professional) for a while now but it has been fairly sporadic.
Lately though, I am really struggling to use Visual Studio as pretty much whenever i try and do anything with any Razor views (mostly clicking to move the cursor) visual studio hangs and the above message appears for about a minute at a time.
(If when its finished doing stuff i then click in the view again, the process repeats, and repeats, and repeats.....)
I have searched high and low, and read loads of articles regarding this and peoples suggestions and tried changing indentation settings, resetting settings, etc but none have worked.
Has anyone come across something else that may work as this is seriously impeding my ability to use visual studio and sadly provoking much cursing.
I also had the same issue with VS2012 and unfortunately I had to format my pc after trying all the following solutions:
Move/clean the symbols cache
Reset VS preferences
Install Upgrade 2
Uninstall/Reinstall VS
After formatting and reinstalling VS2012, it started working like a charm again (obviously).
Sorry for that.
I know I asked this question a while back, but I thought best to put up my findings as they may help others.
The exact reason for the Waiting dialog is still unknown, but I have since moved my project to a local disk and implemented Team Foundation server to perform the hosting and backup of the main project files.
Since moving to local disk and using TFS, I have not experienced any more of the VS Waiting dialog.
Check if IIS or another process (BizTalk maybe) is locking your DLLs/references
Kill/stop IIS if it is
My installation of Visual studio eats up memory like a starved pig. Depending on what I'm doing, after a while, it's too slow and I have to reload it. Typically, devenv.exe will get to around 700 MB before I have to reload it.
I would expect that it's slowing down because of some excessive page swaps or something.
I read somewhere that Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F12 helps, but it does nothing.
Is there any fixes for this, or at least anything that will allow me to run it for longer till it explodes my ram, ie starts to run slow at 4gb rather than 700mb.
I have Windows 7 x64 with 8GB ram. Using Virgin anti virus stuff.
I have lots of Addons running, I have a suspition that it might be resharper that's causing it to slow.
The number of projects or solutions is irrelevant, as I can run a single winforms project with about 50 lines of code and after a few dozen debugs etc, it'll still be like trying flog a dead horse.
Ta.
Intellisense has been known to cause problems, you may want to try to disable it.
Also I had BIG problems with my Anti virus (Kaspersky), the newer versions use a new 'signature' technique that brought mine to a crawl.
Hope this helps
I am tired of how slow the VS2010 is. I know there are a lot of topics here about tuning the settings and I've read/applied them all with not much luck though. Namely the things I've already done:
removed all the extensions
never had a resharper
tuned the settings to get maximum performance
tried SSD and RAM disks
Nothing helped it is still unacceptably slow. I know what I am saying because with VS2008 I never had such problems.
Now, I am working on a quite big C# solution with about 20 projects in it. Visual Studio works quite fast when just opened, but as time goes it starts lagging and eventually gets so slow that I have to restart it. The resource monitor shows that the amount of memory consumed by it is about 200 MB in the beginning and goes up to ~600 MB and then doesn't go any higher. I have 8 GB of total RAM on a x64 laptop with about 4GB that are always free. I find it weird how little memory the VS uses and from what my common sense tells me the more memory the faster the app should work. So I believe my question is how to make the VS use more of the available memory.
PS
I tried a recipe from Configure Visual Studio to use more ram Didn't work out.
There is no way to make Visual Studio use more memory. The application itself has no preset limitation. It will simply use the amount of memory that is granted it by the operating system (just like other apps).
The reason you see it increase to 600MB and then stop is just a side effect of how the managed GC works. As it performs operations like displaying intellisense, performing edits, etc ... more managed objects will be created. Eventually the GC is triggered and it reclaims all of the free objects and the longer lived ones are promoted. Overall though memory usage will be lowered but not as much as before you started editing. Then you edit some more and this process continues until it reaches the appearance of a steady state. If you deeply analyze it you'll see that it's actually more of a saw tooth graph of memory usage.
As to why your particular instance of Visual Studio is slow though is hard to determine remotely. 20 projects is a larger solution but performance should still be acceptable even with that many. Couple of things to try in order to isolate the problem
Try editing a smaller solution. It's possible there is one project in particular which is giving VS a problem. Breaking the project down into smaller solutions could help isolate it.
Try disabling Aero on your computer. It's possible that WPF is a problem here
I saw that Beta 1 of VS2010 was publicly availible.
My question to those of you who has tried it is: does it work good?
Will it cause my computer to blow up in tiny pieces? Will it crash randomly? Will it work with some minor glitches? Or is it just perfect from bottom up?
I'm only coding school- and hobby-stuff, so nothing that someones life depend upon, but i still want software that works. How close to a final product is it? Is it worth trying?
It's a bit slow, and there's no offline MSDN, but it's worth trying IMO. Having said that it's slow, I still use it on my NC10 netbook, so it's clearly not that bad :)
I've got it side-by-side VS2008, and that hasn't caused any problems.
I've seen a couple of glitches (once the keyboard handling went completely wonky) but it's certainly usable. The main question is what you want to get out of trying it - in my case I absolutely need to code against C# 4 to explore the new features. I do most of that from the command line in fact, where the speed of VS obviously isn't an issue, but it's nice to see the VS-specific features as well (like the debug threading views for Parallel Extensions).
It seems more or less usable on the .NET side. The C++ side is a bit more sketchy. On one hand, they've added support for some very nice new C++0x features, on the other, they've broken some absolute fundamentals.
Your plain old main function won't compile in 32-bit with unicode enabled. (Workarounds: Either compile as 64-bit, disable unicode, or rename the function to wmain).
This seems to me to be a strong hint that the C++ side of things is nowhere near release-worthy. I'd probably wait for beta2 before doing any serious work with that.
I would say it is great, but the performance hurts a bit.
Here is an idea for you: Install it into a VirtualPC. Then you can play and not care what it does. You don't like it, delete the VPC image and keep on trucking. That is how I play with Microsoft betas now. I never install them on any real machine - too risky.
Usable: Yes.
Recommended: Not if you'r a touchpad-addict or dislike crashing apps.
I've been trying it for 2 weeks now coding small C#-projects and these are my impressions
Reasons to use 2010:
Looks good
Multi monitor support
I can see myself using the code templating but right now i couldnt find any really useful stuff except for reducing the fontsize of comments.
Zoom in the editor
Select a variable and then press shift+up/down to go to next usage of this variable
Ctrl+, brings up instant search of classes and functions in the entire project. (i've become really addicted to this)
Floating watches for single objects
Reasons to not use 2010:
TOUCHPAD SCROLL DOESN'T WORK IN THE EDITOR!!! (this is reason enough to not upgrade if you are using it on a laptop)
I've had some random app-crashes in the middle of just writing code, once or twice per day maybe.
UI sometimes freezes randomly for about 30seconds and then returns to normal.
It started to use 100% CPU power from one of my cores once when it was minimized in basic editing-mode and i was doing other stuff in other programs, i only noticed it because the fan started to go wild.
Otherwhise it's pretty similar to 2008. I haven't noticed any difference in speed like other people say.
You need to ask yourself: what is the advantage for you in using VS2010 over VS2008? I would suggest that there is no advantage if all you are doing is "school- and hobby-stuff".
I'm still using VS2008 for business related stuff (and, indeed, VC6 for some stuff). I prefer to wait until all the early adopters have tested it (and Microsoft has released at least one service pack after the real product release) before I do their testing for them.
It seems to co-exist with other versions of VS without causing any problems.
Regarding the slowness - it seems to be the UI that is slow, rather than building. Once it's going it doesn't seem much slower on my fast quadcore. I've yet to try it on my laptop.
It's usable enough, the small glitches that I've encounter weren't that bad. However, certain VS extensions(like XNA) don't work in VS2010 at the moment.
It's fun to toy with. Not usable for me, cause re#er does not support it yet (had to install TestDriven .NET which works through keyboard shortcuts only to run my tests).
Gave me an insight how addicted I am. :/
Btw, on Win7, without virtual pc it seemed even faster than vs2008 for me.
VS2010 doesn't yet support mobile device projects, which might or might not matter to you.
VC++ wise - VS2010 has a built-in 64-bit compiler, VS2008 does not.
You can supposedly add 64-bit support to VS2008, but it takes some effort.
I've been using VS 2010 beta (with .NET 4.0 beta) on Windows 7 RC. I've been trying to rewrite parts of a large-scale business application in it to see what can be done with it.
The UI freezes frequently. I'm talking 1-10 minutes between freezes. The UI does not come back, so I'm forced to kill devenv.exe every time it happens. Microsoft probably puts my error reports in their spam folder by now.
For me, VS 2010 beta 1 classifies as unusable. However, it's fast, the new IDE functions are very handy, and it's pretty. I keep coming back to it despite my resolutions to wait for a stable build.