I am attempting to debug a performance problem that a customer is experiencing by reproducing it in-house. We suspect that the problem is that the customer has a small amount of physical RAM and the program is paging to disk. This is causing very slow reports.
Is there a way to get Visual Studio to emulate this behaviour when I debug? I would like to closely reproduce in house what I have seen at the customer so that I am sure that I am actually fixing the relevant problem.
Using Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 (14.0.24720.00 Update1)
with ReSharper Ultimate 2015.2 (103.0.20150818.200216)
I would suggest creating a Virtual Machine for this, you will then be able to specify exactly the amount of memory/CPU that the machine is to have. The OS will see this as physical limits, so you will be able to tweak it up and down easily without having to build/reinstall any OS (but would need to restart VM most likely).
For this kind of thing I use the free version of VMware Player, which will happily build a VM from install media.
HTH
Related
I've looked for an answer to this everywhere. It's not a problem with the applications I'm writing, it's a problem with the IDE itself. Whenever I try to access the dropdown menus in Visual studio like File, Edit, etc... I can't see them. I'd post a picture but new users can't. The menus will come up with some pixelated garbage that is useless.
I'm running VS2010 on a Dell Vostro 1000 running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, 4GB RAM. I don't know if this is a hardware issue and I've tried re-installing several times. Same result every time.
I'm having exactly this issue and was wondering if you've managed to solve it.
My graphics drivers and display drivers are all fully up to date.
I'm on Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit also.
I've also installed VS2012 and get a similar issue using that IDE.
I've just found this: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/653315/ui-gets-messed-up
and the work around seems to fix my problem!
Visual Studio 2008 hangs a lot on my machine. I work in an team environment using Team Foundation Server and when the server has issues VS hangs forever, sometimes if I have two instances open one of them will hang even if TFS is working. I try to disconnect from TFS and work offline but even that hangs my VS. Is there any way to make VS more responsive in case TFS is down?
I have a quad core i5 CPU, 8gb ram, and am running locally (not in a VM).
This might help you set VS to work offline and should help with the server timeouts. Also kick the sys admin of your TFS server, it shouldn't be that unreliable.
Sometimes this is caused simply because the TFS dialogs appear off-screen and it appears to hang. If pressing Esc "unfreezes" Visual Studio, then this is likely the problem.
I found the solution at: http://www.imiscommunity.com/visual_studio_2008_hangs_tfs_compare_dialog_not_visible
TFS can be a serious nuisance when developing a solution that is used by many team members. Without knowing more specifics about your setup, I would ask a few more questions:
What is your machine spec?
Are all other developer machines the same spec? Do they experience the same kind of issues?
Have you tried watching the CPU and Memory usage in Windows Task Manager to determine the amount of resources being used?
In summary, I have found that this can often be down to a number of reasons. As a contract developer, I have to use many different systems from the latest desktop with 12GB of RAM and an i7 processor, through to Virtual Machines on a server (my preferred choice because it is scalable and easier to snapshot), down to using older machines that are insufficient for the task (one of the distasteful parts of the jobs is having to request an upgraded machine).
I suggest reinstalling you development environment from scratch, including operating system and everything. Make sure the hardware is the best you can get, and install on a virtual machine instance on that development machine. That way you can take incremental (albeit slightly large at a fair few GB) backups that will prove handy should you come across an issue.
BTW the most common problem I had was with Visual Studio plug-ins on a system that lacked sufficient RAM. ReSharper was my biggest offender as it compiles regularly in the background in order to highlight bugs - but personally I would not code without it now.
Is Visual studio 2010 slower than 2005? I just had my laptop upgraded to windows 7 64bit with visual studio 2010, and vs 2010 is much slower than vs2005 was when I had xp. Any upgrades or configurations you can think of that might help me out?
Turn off the "Enable rich client visual experience" and turn on "Use graphics hardware acceleration if available"
Extra features always come at a cost. If you don't upgrade your computer at a similar rate you upgrade your software, you'll find it gets slower and slower.
About VS2010 specifically, the UI uses WPF, so you need at least a decently passable graphics card to handle it. Intellisense also got a lot better, so it will use slightly more CPU.
For what it's worth, 2010 runs very smoothly on my computer.
Depending on your setup, Visual Studio 2010 can be faster than VS 2010 or slower. I'm not sure from your question in what way Visual Studio is running slower, though.
Is it just Visual Studio, or is anything else slower?
You mentioned you're running Windows 7 x64. If you have more than 4 GB of RAM, this is a good idea. If you have less than 4 GB, you're probably going to be slower than if you're running 32-bit. It's also worth looking at your Windows 7 performance rating--if it's low, applications like Visual Studio will be slow too.
The hardware requirements are listed over at http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/ultimate/system-requirements, but those are bare-bones requirements. If you're doing SharePoint development, then you'll need a much beefier system (SharePoint will compete for a lot of your system resources). I'd want at least 1 GB more RAM than recommended there even without SharePoint. The processor speed is fine for multiple cores, but if you have an old laptop 1.6 GHz and a single core won't be that fast.
Most people find an SSD drive helps incredibly.
Launching Visual Studio does seem to take longer, but to me it runs faster once it's up. F1 help is non-blocking now. Compiles can be done in parallel. Navigation and adding references is faster.
Grab the productivity power pack from vscodegallery.com--that adds a lot of shortcuts.
Visual Studio has more features than previous versions. Most people install everything. It may be better to just install the features you need.
The previous poster mentioned having a good video card or chipset. That's probably a good idea, but disk I/O and CPU are probably more important.
I'm having a bit of a problem where VS won't build because I get OutOfMemoryExceptions. My Vista box with 2 GIG RAM, is using about 1 Gig of RAM when it starts up, and I am not even doing anything (just connecting to the network drives at work etc)
When I then run Visual Studio devenv.exe peaks at around 730MB after a few builds, and I get the error, mostly needing a restart to rectify.
I have disabled Aero and stopped as many unneccessary services and applications in MSCONFIG. I know there is something about Vista using memory and not being bloated, but using up half my memory after just starting up seems a bit excessive (it is the same on a few dev machines).
What sort of peak memory is your application generating and what can I do to try negate this issue?
730 megs after a few builds is not normal.
Some things to try:
Disable all your VS plugins
Ensure VS is running the latest service pack (are you on 2008 SP1)
Try one project at a time to see which one is hogging the memory
Best way how to solved this, is buying more memory.
I have same problem with XP and 1GB memory and it's nightmare for me. Now I have 3GB and it's OK and I can 2 VS in same time.
Thinking about installing Visual Studio on my Asus eee 1000HE. Since it is not a very powerful machine, I am wondering if I should install 2008 or the new 2010. Looks like there has been a lot of changes done to the UI, etc. Does that mean that it now runs smoother as well? Or is it actually heavier to run?
Considering that VS2010 is currently only available as a CTP release, I'd install VS2008.
Once VS2010 is fully released, without debug information and with optimizations enabled, ask this question and consider using it. For the moment, if you have 2008, use it. I doubt 2010 will be faster on your 'slow' hardware.
2010 is much slower on older machines in my opinion. I am running it currently on a Dell 700m with 512MB of RAM and while it does run, it feels sluggish and significantly slower than Visual Studio 2008. (Remember that it is a beta though, I am sure that performance tweaks are forthcoming)
It is a little bit more difficult to judge the performance differences since you are running it in a virtual machine at this time (no stand alone beta out yet).
Edit: If I am incorrect on the inability to run it outside of a virtual machine I apologize and stand corrected.
Does that mean that it now runs smoother as well? Or is it actually heavier to run?
This is an old post, I know, but I just had to chime in and laugh: lol
I had a pretty decent overclocked Wolfdale-based machine I built for gaming. Fast enough for virtually everything I need to do on a computer, except for editing text files in Visual Studio 2010. Just scrolling up and down in a C# file maxed out one of my cores. No joke.
So I upgraded to the new Sandy Bridge 32nm CPUs (3.3GHz, unlocked model) in an enthusiast motherboard, with 8GB of Corsair RAM, and scrolling moving the cursor around in a text buffer in VS2010 is using 30% of the CPU (that's right, it's using multiple cores). This is with no plugins and outlining turned off.
Vim in the same file, doing pretty much anything I can think of, shows 0% CPU usage, always.
VS2010's editor performance is absolutely shameful. There's no other word for it.