I am experiencing a huge amount of lag while using Visual Studio (2019, 2022) xaml editor. So much lag that the editor is frustratingly unusable. Visual studio itself is not slow, so none of the "improve performance" articles that I can find are relevant as general performance is good. This problem really only manifests in the xaml editor.
I believe this might be related to how the Motherboard/CPU is configured (perhaps to use energy saving features so as to consume less energy). However I have no evidence to really prove this, just a gut feel as when using the xaml editor, I hear the CPU fan spin up and I can see activity on task manager showing 6 cores in use, and clock speed increases from its base of 4Ghz to around 4.35Ghz.
I also conclude this because I only experience this problem on one machine, which is a new build with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12 Core cpu. The older machine that works fine has an intel i5-6600K 4 core CPU running at 3.5Ghz. When editing on the old machine, the experience is normal and fine, but with the AMD cpu machine, the visual studio xaml editor is just unusable.
Even a simple action such as just trying to select a few lines of xaml (shift + up cursor to select a few lines), produces lag, and I can hear the fan spin faster, see the CPU speed rise, and if I keep doing it, the cursor is jumping around all over the place and I end up typing in the wrong place, etc, etc.
The new machine has a completely clean/fresh windows build with developer tools. Both bios configurations are reasonably vanilla, despite both CPUs being the unlocked versions, I don't (well not in this circumstance) use any form of overclocking. Also, Visual studio installations are pretty standard, with no customisations.
I have been through the bios (ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F motherboard) and there is nothing obvious that I can see would be causing this - all the settings are on their defaults. I also tried the xaml options within visual studio, but they made no difference and I need to use the XAML designer so disabling it is not an option.
However I assume there are either features in the bios that I could alter? Or perhaps there are other software options in visual studio that might change this behaviour?
Any thoughts or suggestions on what to look at much appreciated.
We have a few sites running MVC3 on a windows 2008 server. We're seeing that in average these sites are using over 300 mb in memory each one, and high CPU. Each site easily goes to 20-25% CPU when they get requests.
Is this normal?
I know my question is very general, but if we were to spend time on optimization, etc.. what should we aim for? what is considered normal in terms of memory and cpu usage for a typical database driven MVC3 website?
Also, I was told that we should "profile" the application to troubleshoot the high CPU usage? Is this done via Visual Studio, or through some other tools?
thanks for your help in advance,
G.S
Without knowing the details of your application and what it's doing, it's impossible to say what's normal and what isn't. If performance is a problem, you should optimize, if it isn't, you shouldn't :)
Profiling is a general term for measuring the performance of different aspects of your application. You can profile memory, cpu usage, garbage collections and thread use (among other things) using a profiler.
There are several profilers around such as Ants, .Net memory profiler and some excellent ones built into visual studio. They are available in the pro versions of VS2012 and up.
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'm currently having a hard time driving down the peak memory consumption of my background agent below the 6MB limit. Are there any recommendations for WP7 capable memory profilers. I am not even asking for something along the lines of dotTrace but basically anything that offers some insight about what's going on.
The Windows Phone SDK comes with a profiler for both memory consumption, and other things, that's available in Visual Studio after installation of the SDK.
You can read more about it on MSDN
Also, try look isolated at the background agent code, and move it to a separate application, where you run it in the foreground. That could possible make it easier for you to nail where the problem is.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I don't know if anybody else has had an issue with the performance of Visual Studio 2010, but I close it daily and reopen it, and with an hour it starts to really bog down, and can't even keep up with my typing. Is there some obvious setting I am missing that would help to speed it up?
I am also using ReSharper, but even if I remove that, it only marginally increases the speed.
Since a couple of people have asked for my machine specs:
Intel Q9550 # 2.83 GHz
4 Cores
8GB Physical RAM
2x 60GB SSD in RAID0 combination for solution/project
VS2010 RTM Ultimate
Windows Server 2008 x64 R2 (Performance set for Applications)
Although it is sad to hear that the answer is "buy faster hardware" when my hardware is actually pretty good.
EDIT: Including a link to the Visual Studio Performance Diagnostics tool suggested by TimothyP
I recommend you consider to install some hotfixes from http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads. I had also havy performance problems before and seen messages like "insufficient memory" during Cut & Paste operations. This problem and some other (inclusive different Memory leak problems) are already hixed. After installing some hotfixes from http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads the performance of Visual Studio on my computer is much better.
Adding my own answer here. I really didn't think ReSharper did that much. After trying every option and only loading one project, it was still lagging even from simply joining 2 lines together (a couple of backspace presses).
I uninstalled ReSharper and along with all of the other tweaks I have done, the thing is blazingly fast.
One note re RAID0 SSDs. You should make sure your RAID controller (and driver!) supports TRIM for RAIDed SSDs. Most RAID controllers - especially the Intel chipset controllers - do NOT do this. The consequence is that I/O performance will quickly degenerate very significantly in SSD-based RAID arrays.
Windows 7 and Windows 2008R2 support the TRIM command - when your controller and driver implement it.
There is lots on this subject at sites like tomshardware.com or anandtech.com. If all else fails, you might consider either using SSDs in non-RAID, or using SSD for OS and normal, large HD for databases etc. You could also look up your specific SSDs on one of the aforementioned sites; performance varies much more widely than you might think.
Try turning off IntelliTrace. I've had numerous problems related to slowness and instability because of this feature (it could just be me). The setting is under Tools > Options > IntelliTrace > Enable IntelliTrace.
Of course, RAM is always very important for a large development environment like Visual Studio, especially the 2010 version and especially if you're using the Ultimate edition which includes such fairly memory intensive features as IntelliTrace and the Architecture and Modelling Diagrams.
However, one of the main things that is often overlooked, but can make a big difference to the overall performance of Visual Studio, is Hard-Drive Speed.
Scott Guthrie (Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of the .NET Developer Platform) wrote a very interesting article about this exact subject.
It's a few years old, and was written around the time of Visual Studio 2005, however, it is still very relevant today since the way that Visual Studio continues to work (specifically the way the compilers work) has not changed so much over that time.
Scott writes:
People often ask me at conferences for
PC hardware recommendations.
Specifically - "what type of machine
do you recommend I get for doing
development with Visual Studio?"
and/or "your laptop seems really fast,
what type is it?"
Some of my recommendations on this
topic are fairly standard and obvious:
Ideally you want to get a duel core or
better CPU. I also always recommend
getting at least 2GB or more of RAM.
The recommendation I make that often
seems to take people a little by
surprise is to make sure you always
get the fastest possible hard-drive
when buying a new machine - and where
necessary trade off purchasing
additional CPU processor speed in
favor of investing in a faster disk
instead.
Also:
Why does hard drive speed matter?
Multi-core CPUs on machines have gotten fast enough over the past few years that in most >common application scenarios you don't usually end up blocking on available processor >capacity in your machine.
What you are much more likely to block on is the Seek and I/O speed capacity with which >your computer accesses your hard drive. If you are using an application that needs to >read/write a lot of files, it is not atypical for your CPU processor utilization to be >really low - since the application might be spending most of its time just waiting for >the disk operations to complete.
When you are doing development with Visual Studio you end up reading/writing a lot of >files, and spend a large amount of time doing disk I/O activity. Large projects and >solutions might have hundreds (or thousands) of source files (including images, css, >pages, user controls, etc). When you open a project Visual Studio needs to read and >parse all source files in it so as to provide intellisense. When you are enlisted in >source control and check out a file you are updating files and timestamps on disk. When >you do a compilation of a solution, Visual Studio will check for updated assemblies from >multiple disk path locations, write out multiple new assemblies to disk when the >compilation is done, as well as persist .pdb debugger symbol files on disk with them (all >as separate file save operations). When you attach a debugger to a process (the default >behavior when you press F5 to run an application), Visual Studio then needs to search and >load the debugger symbols of all assemblies and DLLs for the application so as to setup >breakpoints.
If you have a slow hard-drive, Visual Studio will end up being blocked as it waits for it >to complete these read/write operations - which can really slow down your overall >development experience.
You can read the full article here:
Tip/Trick: Hard Drive Speed and Visual Studio Performance
Do you have the Desktop Experience component enabled in your Server 2008 R2 install? Unlike prior versions, Visual Studio 2010 makes heavy use of WPF and its performance benefits greatly from hardware acceleration. Enabling Desktop Experience will enable the Desktop Window Manager, which improves overall WPF performance.
For the same reason, you should ensure you are using the newest video drivers available.
If you are using many projects to build together in your solution I recommend to set to NOT BUILD in the project properties configuration. This is what I do to speed up mine. It is more evident in the Compile time...
With that kind of hardware, IMHO you shouldn't have any kind of trouble with performance almost no matter what you do. (2 x SSD in RAID-0? -- you're a maniac!!)
It looks like you've already solved this problem (is there anything specific that you did that you could share?), but another thing to check is to make sure your video drivers are up to date. It's surprising, but they can affect a lot of things you wouldn't suspect.
I suppose another culprit could be a hyperactive anti-virus package, too...
I love the suggestion of upgrades when clearly the machine is blazing. My suggestion, if possible would be to try out 2008 and see how it runs. I had several problems myself with 2010, least of all being the performance issue. For the sake of productivity I switched back to 2008.
If you can confirm that the problem does or doesn't occur on an older version we can have more of an idea where the problem lies.
The brand/controller of your SSDs is more important than the fact that they are SSD. Don't buy a cheap/budget SSD - you'd be better off with a good platter drive. Splurge on the high end SSDs and you'll experience major gains.
If you're editing XAML, you can just use the source code editor instead of the XAML editor. The performance difference is phenomenal:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb907321(v=vs.90).aspx
It's worth noting that if you open the xaml editor at any point, then you'll need to restart Visual Studio to get the performance back to normal. It's not sufficient to close the xaml editor.
The only way to get an ssd on raid0 with trim support is with the new ocz revo 3, 1.5GB Read/1.25GB Write, A more affordable and stable solution to raided ssd with no trim is to buy an ssd on sata 3 (550MB/s).
As Matt mentioned,
you might want to add more RAM to your machine,
but if it really "bogs down" every time you leave it open for an hour
you might want to get in contact with the VS team (http://connect.microsoft.com),
file a bug report and run the performance diagnostics tools they will send you.
Those guys have really helped me a lot in the past
and I'm sure they'd be willing to help you track down the real reason behind the slow downs.
Aside from that I can tell you that my main development machine
has 8 Xeon cores and 12GB of RAM. On that machine large solutions compile
in just a few seconds while they can take up to a minute to compile on my dual core macbook.
But since the RTM version I have not experienced any slow downs like the ones you are describing.
I'm assuming you are using the RTM version here,
can you give us the specs of your machine? Hardware + Software?
It's very hard to help you based on limited information.
I'm assuming you're using C#, but if you're using C++, maybe you could try turning off intellisense? I thought it was supposed to be better in 2010, but the previous versions always got a speed boost when I hacked out intellisense.
If it's the same as 2005, you can disable intellisense by renaming feacp.dll in [vs root dir]\vc\vcpackages.