Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 has been a nightmare. There seems to be a long delay between when I press a key and when it appears in the code editor window. When I scroll, either in the code editor or in the navigation pane, it takes many seconds. I've had similar problems with VS 2010 and VS 2012 (see Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate slow while editing C# code). Another person had a similar problem, none of their solutions helped me with mine (Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate slow while editing C# code).
My machine is running Windows 8.1, has an Intel i7 and 16GB of RAM, and a Samsung SSD. It's pretty fast.
What I've experienced:
Visual Studio absolutely hammers the registry per Process Monitor
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\CTF\KnownClasses
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Cryptography\Defaults\Provider Types\Type 001 HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Cryptography\Defaults\Provider
Types\Type 001\Name HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography\MachineGuid
HKCR\Drive\shellex\FolderExtensions, HKCU\Software\Classes
HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Cryptography\DESHashSessionKeyBackward
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Cryptography\Defaults\Provider\Microsoft
Enhanced Cryptographic Provider v1.0\Image Path
Processor Monitor also shows that, when I attempt to interact with the code in any way, VS literally kicks off about 85,000 events, all containing access to files in the project and the registry keys listed above. There are also a lot of 'NotifyChangeDirectory' events to my user home directory and a lot of 'Thread Create' and 'Thread Exit' events.
What I've tried:
deleting files/folders in the AppData temp directory unchecked
hardware graphics acceleration (Tools > Options > Environment)
disabled source control plugin (Tools > Options > Source Control)
disabled synchronized settings (Tools > Options > Environment)
disabled auto recover (Tools > Options > Auto Recover) reinstalling
SQL server compact edition 4.0 deleting the .SUO file disabled
codelens rebooting (too many times)
This behavior also happens when I start Visual Studio in safe mode.
Per Task Manager, Visual Studio isn't consuming a lot of CPU/RAM (up to 3% CPU, 150MB of RAM). Additionally, not using BitLocker, disk is unencrypted, and no add-ins are installed in Visual Studio.
This is really, really bad. It's become practically unusable. If anyone has any idea how to fix this, I will be in your debt.
This did it.
I really hope this keeps someone from jumping off the bridge.
NoGit is a great extension, but ultimately it came down to removing the registry entries for the Git source control provider.
http://blog.markrendle.net/disable-the-git-source-control-add-in-in-vs2013-permanently/
I'm running Visual Studio 2013 Pro (RTM version) on my formatted PC (Windows 8.1 fresh install).
I don't know why, but Visual Studio 2013 Pro is very very slow! Slow for building, debugging, navigating in the IDE... my hard disk drive LED is not lighting up at all!
I'm on a little MFC (C++) project using the Boost library.
Any ideas?
It is something concerned with the graphics drivers. If you update them you will be fine.
Or you can disable the hardware graphics acceleration in Visual Studio according to these steps:
In Visual Studio, click "Tools", and then click "Options".
In the Options dialog box, navigate to the "Environment > General" section and clear the "Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance" check box. (Refer to the following screen shot for this step.)
Clear the "Use hardware graphics acceleration if available" check box to prevent the use of hardware graphics acceleration.
Select or clear the "Enable rich client visual experience" check box to make sure that rich visuals are always on or off, respectively. When this check box is selected, rich visuals are used independent of the computer environment. For example, rich visuals are used when you run Visual Studio locally on a rich client and over remote desktop.
References:
You experience performance issues, product crashes, or rendering issues in Visual Studio 2013
Try to set Current source control plug-in to None (menu Tools → Options → Source Control), if you are using the Microsoft Git provider, which seems to slow Visual Studio 2013 down more and more the larger the repository gets.
I had the whole Dojo Toolkit framework under source control using the Microsoft Git provider, and it got to the point where there were delays from the time I hit a key to the time the glyph would appear on the screen. That bad.
When/if you need Git again, you can switch to the TortoiseGit provider or Git-Extensions, both will work without slowdown. I like Git-Extensions, personally.
I too have struggled a bit with bad performance in Visual Studio 2013 (Premium). Pretty much the same issues as TS had. Slow navigation, scrolling, building... just about everything. Luckily I have manage to solve my own problem by disabling Synchronized Settings in Visual Studio.
Go to menu Tools → Options → Environment-Synchronized Settings and remove this option by unchecking the checkbox.
In the case of web applications, another cause of slow building and debugging (but not IDE navigation) could be the Browser Link feature.
I found that with this switched on, building would take 4 times longer and debugging was painful - after every postback, web pages would freeze for a few seconds before you could interact with them.
I was using a solution upgraded from Visual Studio 2012. Visual Studio 2013 also upgraded the .suo file. Deleting the solution's .suo file (it's next to the .sln file), closing and re-opening Visual Studio fixed the problem for me. My .suo file went from 91KB to 27KB.
I had the same problem and the only solution that worked for me was to follow the three steps presented below:
Clean the WebSiteCache folder (you may find it at
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache)
Clean the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" folder (find it at
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files)
Restart Visual Studio
What fixed it for me was disabling Git by setting Current source control plug-in to None in Visual Studio, menu Options → Source Control:
This issue seems to be because of uninstalling the SQL Server Compact edition (4.0).
I was having this issue, and it got fixed after installing the SQL Server Compact edition 4.0.
On closing Visual Studio 2013, I was getting a message to install SQL Server Compact edition as a C++ project needed some thing... can't put finger on anything.
Resolve this issue by installing Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0
I can advise an option like this.
CodeLens can be disabled like as at the picture. It gives a lot of performance goodness.
If you are debugging an ASP.NET website using Internet Explorer 10 (and later), make sure to turn off your Internet Explorer 'LastPass' password manager plugin. LastPass will bring your debugging sessions to a crawl and significantly reduce your capacity for patience!
I submitted a support ticket to Lastpass about this and they acknowledged the issue without any intention to fix it, merely saying: "LastPass is not compatible with Visual Studio 2013".
I had the same problem and all the solutions mentioned here didn't work out for me.
After uninstalling the "Productivity Power Tools 2013" extension, the performance was back to normal.
One more thing to check; for me it was Fusion logging.
I'd turned this on a very long time ago and more or less forgotten about it. Getting rid of the 5000+ directories and 1 GB of logged files worked wonders.
There is a good workaround for this solution if you are experiencing slowness in rendering the .cs files and .cshtml files.
Just close all the files opened so that the cache gets cleared and open the required files again.
Visual Studio Community Edition was slow switching between files or opening new files. Everything else (for example, menu items) was otherwise normal.
I tried all the suggestions in the previous answers first and none worked. I then noticed it was occurring only on an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application, so I added a new ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application, and this was fast.
After much trial and error, I discovered the difference was packages.config - If I put the Microsoft references at the top of the file this made everything snappy again.
Move the Microsoft* entries to the top.
It appears you don’t need to move them all - moving say <package id="Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure" has an noticeable effect on my machine.
As an aside
Removing all contents of the file makes it another notch faster too*
Excluding packages.config from Visual Studio does not fix the issue
A friend using Visual Studio 2013 Premium noticed no difference in either of these cases (both were fast)
UPDATE
It appears missing or incomplete NuGet packages locally are the cause. I opened the Package manager and got a warning 'Some NuGet packages are missing from this solution' and choose to Restore them and this sped things up. However I don’t like this as in my repository I only add the actual items required for compilation as I don’t want to bloat my repository, so in the end I just removed the packages.config.
This solution may not suit your needs as I prefer to use NuGet to fetch the packages, not handle updates to packages, so this will break this if you use it for that purpose.
For me, the problem was the Start page -- it was downloading content and causing Visual Studio to hang.
The only solution for me was to:
Kill the DevEnv process from Task Manager
Start Visual Studio in Safe Mode from the command line:devenv.exe /safemode
Go to menu Tools → Options, and select the Environment/Startup options
Choose "Show empty environment" for the startup action
Close Visual Studio
Restart normally
Running unit tests was slow. It was a ReSharper issue.
Menu ReSharper → Options → Environment → General ... Clear Caches
Menu Tools → Options → ReSharper → General ... Suspend Now
Close Visual Studio
Delete the .suo file.
Open Visual Studio again.
Re-enable ReSharper.
I also had an issue with a slow IDE.
In my case I installed
ReSharper
Npgsql (low chance to cause the problem)
Entity Framework Power Tools Beta 4
The following helped me a bit:
Disabled synchronization - menu Tools → Options → Environment-Synchronized Settings
Disabled plug-in selection - menu Tools → Studio → Options → Source Control.
Disabled Entity Framework Power Tools Beta 4 - menu Tools → Extensions and Updates
Uninstalled JetBrain's Resharper - WOW!! I am fast again!!
Change the Fusion Log Value to 0. It solved my issue.
This is the FusionLog key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion
Check ForceLog value (1 enabled, 0 disabled).
I was also facing this issue for quite long time. Below are the steps that I perform, and it works for me always:
Deleting the solution's .suo file.
Deleting the Temporary ASP.NET Files (You can find it at find it at %WINDOW%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\Temporary ASP.NET Files)
Deleting all breakpoints in the application.
Visual Studio 2013 has a package server running, and it was spending up to 2 million K of memory.
I put it to low priority and affinity with only one CPU, and Visual Studio ran much more smoothly.
Performance Explorer
Have you been using menu Analyze → Performance and Diagnostics? I have! It's awesome! But you may want to clean up.
Open the Performance Explorer. If you collapse all of the items in there, select all, then you can right click and do Delete.
My solution opens faster and is in general running much faster now.
Also you may notice changes to your sln file as shown. For me, this section was deleted from the sln.
GlobalSection(Performance) = preSolution
HasPerformanceSessions = true
EndGlobalSection
In Visual Studio 2015 Community edition, I've experienced a very (very) slow IDE after changing the "Environment Font" on menu Tools → Options... → Fonts and Colors.
Reverting this options back to the default value ("automatic") solved it immediately.
I had similar problems when moving from Visual Studio 2012 → Visual Studio 2013. The IDE would lock up after almost every click or save, and building would take several times longer. None of the solutions listed here helped.
What finally did help was moving my projects to a local drive. Visual Studio 2012 had no problems storing my projects on a network share, but Visual Studio 2013 for some reason couldn't handle it.
I had a Visual Studio 2013 installed, and it was running smoothly. At some point it started to get sluggish and decided to install Visual Studio 2015. After install, nothing changed and both versions were building the solution very slow (around 10 minutes for 18 projects in solution).
Then I have started thinking of recently installed extensions - the most recent installed was PHP tools for Visual Studio (had it on Visual Studio 2013 only). I am not sure how can an extension affect other versions of Visual Studio, but uninstalling it helped me to solve the problem.
I hope this will help others to realize that it is not always Visual Studio's fault.
I added "devenv.exe" as an exclusion to Windows Defender. This solved my problem completely. People can try this as their first try.
I have the same problem, but it just gets slow when trying to stop debugging in Visual Studio 2013, and I try this:
Close Visual Studio, then
Find the work project folder
Delete .suo file
Delete /obj folder
Open Visual Studio
Rebuild
None of the suggestions worked for me, but I did solve my problem. I had tried most of the other recommendations before coming to the following solution.
My Scenario/Problem:
Using Visual Studio 2017 with ReSharper Ultimate. Keyboard input in the IDE got super slow as others have described. The last change I made to my solution was to add a new web site project, so I looked into that. After trying a lot of things, I tried adding a second web site project, so I could try to replace the first one, and Visual Studio just tanked after that. It wouldn't even load the solution anymore.
My Solution:
I forced Visual Studio closed and then I removed the newly added web site project(s) from the .sln file using Notepad. After saving and starting Visual Studio, my solution loaded quickly and everything seemed to be back to normal. I added a new Web Site with a slightly different configuration (see the thinking below), and the problem did not present itself again.
My Thinking:
I think the problem stemmed from creating the new web site project and using a file system path to a network share that is hosted in Azure. I'm working over VPN which tends to slow things down, and I occasionally experience various routing problems with some services, so my problem/solution might be a bit of a snowflake. I changed the file system path to be a local repository and will publish the files as needed which seems like a much better way to go.
I had a Visual Studio behavior where the typing was slow for my HTML files. Previously when I installed, I guessed that because my HTML files were generic HTML that the need to install any web development tools from the workload component of the installer was unnecessary. I went back and installed this bit and Visual Studio behavior became as I expected it.
This already has a bunch of answers here, but a general way to easily boost Visual Studio is to clear your temp files.
Press the Windows Key and R, and enter 'temp'. Press enter, and provide any administrator permission if you need to. Then press Control A to select all, and hit the Del key. Remember to provide any administrator permissions, and if 'the item is already in use' then just press skip.
After this, Press Windows Key and R again, but this time type '%temp%'. Repeat the previous steps in the new directory.
Finally, empty the recycle bin.
This might not help a ton, but it should boost general performance.
My issue is that I cannot add SourceSafe Database for source control within Visual Studio 2010.
Our team was initially using VSS for source control in Visual Studio 2010. During an evaluation of TFS, I switched my source control to TFS. It will be a few weeks before a decision is made on TFS, so I needed to switch my source control back to VSS. However I'm now unable to add a SourceSafe Database in Visual Studio.
Steps to Reproduce in Visual Studio 2010:
1) Access the 'Open SourceSafe Database' form via Tools->Options->Source Control->Plug-in Settings-->Advanced
or via File->Source Control
2) The list of available database is blank so I choose 'Browse'.
3) I browse to the srcsafe.ini file for my VSS database and select it.
4) I'm promted to confirm the Database Name - Click OK.
5) The database does not appear in the 'Open SourceSafe' Database form. The list of available databases is still blank.
Note that I can add the database fine outside of Visual Studio using VSS directly. However the databases I add via VSS do not appear in the Visual Studio forms.
I'm suspicious that this is related to "down-grading" from TFS to VSS which may not have been heavily tested at MS.
Any assistance is appreciated.
I installed VS2010, then i install VSS, then i have the same problem, cant connect to my VSS it by default opens (TFS)
the suggestion here, to reinstall, dont sound good, did a bit more searching and found this:-
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/vssourcecontrol/thread/6c927805-bca6-445b-b406-0a0da8fa21d3
and found the easy solution that 'CletusLoomis' is looking for:
simply:-
hanks for your post.
Could you please try the following steps?
Open VS2010, then choose the menu: Tools->Options, then click "Souce Control"
click drop-down box under text"Current souce control plug-in", use "None", rather than "Microsoft Visual Source Safe"
thats it, problem solved!
:)
hope this helps someone else who found this page via google.
To do that you must run Visual Studio 2010 as Administrator. Just click on Icon using right button, Go to Properties, Compatibility, at the botton of screen you should mark Run this program as administrator.
That's all.
Must exist some file that the permission should be granted to all users, but instead of searching for the file, I preffer this solution.
Regards,
Luiz Ricci
My Visual Studio 2010 had very similar symptoms: having selected Visual SourceSafe 2005 in the Options I had the only menu option: Launch Microsoft SourceSafe
While following the steps provided by 'visual' (as of Nov 30 '10 at 8:00) I have found the following registry key, which needs to be switched to 0 to enable the SourceSafe menu options to be displayed in Visual Studio 2010. Once the registry key value has been changed to zero Visual Studio needs to be restarted and .. voila! Now I have an additional menu option Open from source control...
The registry key is as follows (for 32bit OS it would need to be slightly modified): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\SourceSafe\Namespace Extension\DisableOpenFromSourceControl
Now, why it was disabled by default is beyond me.
Your installation of VS might be corrupted. I would recommend uninstalling VSS, VS, and TFS and then reinstalling VS and VSS. Unfortunately, this could take 4+ hours, but it should fix your issue.
I don't believe that my VS installation was corrupted. I do believe there is a bug in VS 2010 which does not allow me to use VSS for source control after having used TFS. Fortunately for me, our team decided to go forward with TFS for our project's source control. I never had to solve the problem. I believe that reinstalling Visual Studio alone would have been enough to solve the issue.
I had the same problem with Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010 and VSS. I noticed several things:
VSS as standalone program does always work on my system.
VSS works perfectly in my projects, if the UAC Level is the lowest, but not with the default UAC Level.
If I open a project file with VSS source control, Visual Studio tries to read the registry. It fails to read/write the keys in the registry with access denied. Therefore I changed the permissions in the registry of the SourceSafe keys to full access for all users. Now, VSS works perfectly on my system with default UAC security level.
I faced the same problem.
I am using Visual Studio 2010 and my projects added to Visual SourceSafe 6.0
The VSS database list was not prompted on my machine as well.
After a number of attempts for over 3 hours. Finally got a solution.
I run the VS2010 using Run As Administrator option. The VSS database list was visble.
I think the issue might be due to Access Rights of Registry in Windows 7.
What a nightmare this has been. Ultimately, you can set in domain or local policy.
Local Security Policy\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode - Disabled
This means anyone in the administrator group does not have to have approval (The Dreaded Run as Administrator)to be an administrator. Can be set locally as above or domain wide. Solved a lot of problems for us.
Options -> Source Control -> Make sure the "Current Source Control Plugin" is correctly set.
Mine was set to Microsoft Visual Source Safe (Internet), and should have been Microsoft Visual Source Safe.
First, make sure you can view the database by visual source safe explorer.
Then, trying to proceed with these step...
Open Visual studio as Administrator.
Log in visual source safe by the database path. (it still disappears the database in "Available database" list.)