I have some inline assembly which I try to profile. Interestingly two very similar operations maxss and minss right after each other have a very different performance impact. Does anybody have experience with this? Perhaps it is some caching? Or the CPU Usage in Visual Studio is just not correct.
From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/273858/software-worth-buying, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/143088/open-source-c-projects-that-have-high-code-quality and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/180939/net-must-have-development-tools, I found some software tools are multiple recommended such as Reshaper, dotTrace, and NDepend.
I use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, and it has some features such as code coverage, profiling, and StyleCop to name a few, and it's pretty expensive.
As a user of VS 2010 Ultimate, is it worth while to invest those tools I mentioned? Or, do they provide similar functionalities that VS 2010 Ultimate already has?
Prosseek, this is a good question you are asking. I have tested VS options and most of third-party options. From my experience, third-parties tooling are always more convenient whatever the area covered. I agree with Ladislav Mrnka opinions: VS Ultimate provides large feature set out of the box but many features are like "basic implementation".
In more details:
R# is more subtle and relevant than VS equivalent, when it comes to read, edit and refactor code.
NCover is as fast as VS coverage, but it doesn't come with the frictionfull instrumentation phase. Also NCover proposes more interesting facilities to harness coverage results.
DotTrace is faster and easier to harness than VS profiler, both for performance and memory management. There are also interesting alternatives like RedGate ANTS performance and memory profilers.
TestDriven.NET is more adapted to run tests than VS test integration, especially because it integrates with most of third-party options (as a consequence if you are only using VS tooling, TD.NET is useless).
My opinion is certainly biased concerning NDepend since I am part of the tool team. An objective and measurable fact is that NDepend is 10 to 100 times faster concerning dependency graph and matrix and I encourage you to verify this fact by yourself (NDepend comes with a trial). Also, here you'll find an independent comparison of NDepend versus VS2010 Arch.
All these tools have trial so you can try it yourselves and you will see. VS Ultimate provides large feature set out of the box but many features are like "basic implementation". It is always about what you expect from these features and what you like. I love Resharper but I worked with people who didn't like it.
I've noticed since installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 that I'm having huge performance issues. It will randomly freeze up on me quite a bit.
I had no performance issues with Visual Studio 2010 before the upgrade. The only add-on I have running is ReSharper.
I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing performance issues? If so have you found a way to fix them?
I emailed ReSharper support and they were helpful enough to point out that there is a known issue with the Productivity Power tools add-on not playing nice with ReSharper. They asked me to disable the Productivity Power Tools and see if performance returned to normal.
I disabled the Productivity Power Tools and my Visual Studio with SP1 seems to behave normally again. This is an acceptable solution for me since the only part of the tools I used was the Document Tab Well, the rest seem pretty worthless to me. JetBrains is a really good company so I'm sure they will work on resolving the issue, or at least work with MS to determine which the problem is caused by.
Though my own hunch has me thinking the Productivity Power Tools are the culprit and not ReSharper.
Kind of ironic that the "Productivity" Power Tools were making me much less productive.
I haven't noticed this problem, but Scott Guthrie's blog entry on SP1 indicated near the end that VS SP1 now uses software rendering rather than hardware rendering. This can cause perf issues for some. You may want to check this out. You can access the setting in Tools | Options on the Environment/General dialog.
Installing sp1 has definitely made visual studio 2010 slower. Finding VS 2010 a bit dissapointing. Having said that, sp1 by default turns off hardware graphics acceleration in the tools options dialog. If you turn that back on and turn off rich client visual experience then things get a bit faster (I think).
Try to remove resharper, I had problems like yours when I had it
For me, the SP1 setup was stuck for several hours so I searched the Internet and found lots of people complaining about SP1 being slow (once they manage to install it!) so I cancelled the upgrade. The rollback also remained stuck. After many hours, I had to shut down the computer. Then, Windows Update tried to update .NET 4 and the update was frozen. Even when shutting down won't resolve this as Windows needs to finish installing updates before shutting down, so the only way to unfreeze it was to do a physical reboot. Now my Visual Studio 2010 installation is broken, I'm currently re-installing it...
Considering my experience and everything I read about it, I would advise to stay away from this service pack. Microsoft used to have a bad reputation for reliability (Win95-WinME era) but has been doing great in the last years. They seem to have came back again to their unreliable releases problems. Lots of people criticize Bill Gates, but I have to say... software quality isn't the same since he left. He truly was a genius.
Edit: repairing Visual Studio reported several errors and 3 unimportant components failed to install. However, Visual Studio wouldn't open because SP1 was only partially installed. I went to the control panel and uninstalled the partial SP1. Visual Studio still doesn't open, so I need to repair the installation a second time. Lots of hassles for a service pack...
First, just to clarify -- when you say it freezes, does it eventually recover? Or do you have to kill & restart VS? If you have to kill & restart, then you most likely have a configuration problem of some sort, and the rest of my answer would be less relevant. :-)
If it does eventually recover, then I'd wonder where the performance bottleneck is. Is your disk busy the whole time it's frozen? Is CPU pegged at 100% (or perhaps a smaller number for multi-core environments)? Do you have enough RAM to support whatever programs are running without too much swapping to disk? Built-in Windows tools like Task Manager and Performance Monitor, or SysInternals tools like DiskMon and Process Monitor, can help you narrow it down.
Personally I've found disk to be the most frequent bottleneck for VS, Outlook, Eclipse, and many other resource-intensive programs. If you discover that disk is the problem, I'd strongly suggest upgrading to a solid-state drive -- if you haven't already done so and have the option to do so. That might sound drastic, and in a sense it's just "throwing hardware at the problem," but it's the single most significant performance boost I've experienced on a laptop or workstation in a LONG time.
For what it's worth, I haven't found a significant difference in performance between VS2010 and VS2010 SP1, and I'm running XP 32-bit on a ~2-year-old laptop with a solid-state drive. I'm not aware of any SP1 changes that would make VS substantially more disk-intensive.
The only extension I have in VS 2010 is Resharper. CPU is Intel Core2 Quad 6600, 4Gb RAM.
After installing SP1 I've noticed memory leakage, CPU time for devenv is 25% on standby, scrolling, changing the position of cursor and switching tabs take several seconds.
See blog post here
Trinition - I got te same problem of one of the core i7 cores running at 100% and it killed Vs 2010. But it was running at 100% even if vs wasn't loaded. Initially I thought it was a hardware problem so moved the disk to an identically configured PC. One core still ran at 100%. I ran malwarebytes across the system but It didn't report anything, and nor did my AV. My workstation was so slow, I had to scroll back through backups until i found one that was ok. It was really weird and I didn't find out the cause. I think something Malicious was the cause though.
What was worse was, shortly after this, vs went haywire: every time I loaded it, it replicated another copy of all the components in the toolbox. Uninstalling sp1 and repairing vs2010 ad them reinstalling sp1 and other components fixed, but all in all I lost two days to something for which I still have no explanation. Wish I'd found your entry about the 100% core at the time: it didn't show up on google 'cos that's exactly wat i searched for.
Barry
One of our critical company apps (C#) crunches hi-rez images, and we've made great efforts to optimize it. It performes over 2.5 million operations in ~ 2.5 seconds.
We've used VS 2005 for years, and last week, moved everything over to VS 2010.
Same exact project code.
Now, when I build the app and run it (outside the VS 2010 IDE), the very same operation takes 5 + seconds every time.
This is a big issue, and absolutely hurts my brain. I currently have it set to Release mode (same as I had it in VS 2005).
Any idea what could be causing a doubling of the execution time when the code is precisely the same?
You are probably seeing the change because you switched from targeting the .NET 2.0 runtime to the .NET 4.0 runtime.
You mention you highly optimized the code for performance. My guess is that some of the optimizations are actually hurting your performance rather than helping it now (since internal implementation details of the Framework that you relied on for optimization have changed).
My suggestion would be to run your code through a Profiler (like Redgate's ANTS Performance Profiler or JetBrain's DotTrace) and see where the new bottlenecks are. You can move forward from there.
I am using the 2010 version of Visual Studio, but am having many problems with delays - my computer has a good configuration of RAM, and processor - especially when saving files.
Currently I am carrying a medium-sized project, only one open file (ASP.NET page) using a single suite of components from third party, the Telerik. And yet, in time to save, or modify the tab, the entire IDE is slow. I know there may be several factors for this problem, but I'm not carrying the computer (the problem apparently is the memory management on behalf of the IDE).
Does anyone know any way to improve it? Change settings, Windows services. Oh yes, I'm using a plugin to modify the color of the IDE and another to find (Ctrl-click) the object reference.
Memory Initialization:
Memory: 280000K
Virtual Memory: 350000K
Have you tried disabling all the plugins and make sure that it is VS that actually causes the slowdown?
I have Resharper installed and VS can be slow sometimes. I turned it off (suspend on v5), and VS is back to blazing speed. Of course, inversely coding productivity is impaired by not having Resharper.
There are many causes and circumstances that can lead to what you're describing. So I'd better recommend you to check the links bellow...
VS.Net 2010 IDE Very Slow
VS 2010 very slow
VS 2010 slow for edit of first file in project with many web references
VS2010 C#: Delay when opening a file inside IDE