I'm experiencing some performance problems. When I edit a file, Visual Studio 2008 performs a background (on-the-fly) compilation and then, it updates the error list. During this time, the cursor in the file editor disappears, and the keys I press to move or type more character are buffered.
Once the background compilation is finished, the changes are reflected in the editor (1 - 2 seconds). Every time I edit a file, which happens often, this happens.
How can I fix this problem? If this is not possible, can I disable this automatic build?
I had an odd performance-related issue today. My Microsoft Visual Studio seemed to be taking far too long to perform even the simplest of operations. I Googled around and tried a few ideas that people had such as disabling add-ins or clearing Visual Studio’s recent projects list but those suggestions didn’t seem to solve the problem. I remembered that the Windows SysInternals website had a tool called Process Monitor that would sniff registry and file accesses by any running program.
It seemed to me that Visual Studio was up to something and Process Monitor should help me figure out what it was. I downloaded the most recent version, and after fiddling around a bit with its display filters, ran it and to my horror, I saw that Visual Studio was so slow because it was accessing the more than 10,000 folders in C:\Users\krintoul\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache on most IDE operations. I’m not sure why there were that many folders and moreover, wasn’t sure what Visual Studio was doing with them, but after I zipped those folders up and moved them somewhere else, Visual Studio’s performance improved tremendously.
The Windows SysInternals website has a number of other useful utilities for network management, security, system information and more. Check it out. I’m sure you’ll find something of value.
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I am using VS 2013 ultimate, working on a project with Team Foundation Server. The problem is, every ten seconds, it hangs for up to 5 seconds, I am not compiling or anything, just writing code. Devenv.exe process jumps to more than 25% CPU and 670k of RAM. I have looked at the output from the JavaScript Language Service, and it constantly checks and says Referenced file 'D:\tfs\xxx.aspx' not found. Text search of the filename xxx.aspx in entire solution turns up nothing and I have the latest version. I think this is the reason of the spikes, does anyone know how I can turn off this feature in VS 2013?
EDIT: I have looked at other solutions, Browser Link is closed, I have the latest update
EDIT: I have found the solution, but I dont think it will really help anyone else. One of the guys referenced a hard drive path on top of a javascript page, and since the project is tens of thousands lines, cpu spiked as Visual Studio was searching it. Deleting the references helped in my case.
To narrow down this issue:
Try to disconnect from TFS server. (In VS→ Team → Disconnect from
Team Foundation Server) Check whether this abnormal phenomena still exist.
Use devenv/resetuserdata command to clear user settings of VS,
details refer to this blog: VSTS Tip: devenv /resetuserdata
If you are using proxy in your machine, try to disable the proxy
settings.
If there is anti-virus in the machine, also try to disable it.
We have a really big solution with more than 200 projects and thousands of files. Despite of that the solution used to load pretty quickly in Visual Studio 2010 as well as 2012. However, after copying the whole SVN repository to another location, loading and closing the solution suddenly took extreeeemly long. (I am talking about 30-60 minutes here!)
I found a solution myself and I wanted to share it here, hoping that it might save someone quite a few hours of research and staring at the "Preparing solution..." dialog.
When inspecting the devenv.exe process with Process Monitor, I found out that it is pretty busy with accessing the .svn directory. Here is what I did (and this somehow solved the problem):
Kill Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
Disable AnkhSvn as Source Control plugin (Tools->Options->Source Control->Plug-in Selection->None)
Disable "Document Well 2010 Plus" (VS2010) or "Custom Document Well" (VS2012) in Productivity Power Tools (Tools->Options->Productivity Power Tools) - I read that somewhere and it might have helped as well...
Close Visual Studio
Delete the solution's *.suo file. This is located in the same folder as the solution itself. NOTE: You will lose several settings for your solution, like currently opened files, breakpoints, bookmarks, current solution configuration & platform (e.g. Debug x86) etc.
Restart Visual Studio
Load the solution - it was much faster now!
Close Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio without loading a solution
Re-enable AnkhSvn and the "Document Well"
Restart Visual Studio
Open the solution - it was still loaded in seconds!
I do not know which of these steps actually solved the problem. Probably, not all these steps are required, but I did not want to reproduce the problem to find out which steps may be omitted. :)
None of those helped me, what I did... I watch with ProcMon of sysinternals, filtering for devenv, and I saw a lot of entries of fussionlog. I had enabled fussionlog for debugging purposes some weeks before and didn't think in disabling it. I just had to disable fussionlog and the solution opened faster.
You can open the Visual Studio in the Safe Mode, and then check your plugin and source control settings after opening the project.
Safe Mode means "Starts Visual Studio, loading only the default environment and services."
How :
devenv /SafeMode
Or according to your path
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /SafeMode
source : https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241278.aspx
In my case, the following worked without any of the intervening steps suggested:
Kill Visual Studio.
Start Visual Studio directly (i.e., not from the .sln file).
Then, from within Visual Studio, open the solution.
In my case this was all it took to make the problem solution load quite quickly, without the need for me to change any settings or delete any files.
fwiw, I realize this is a late entry, but I found that simply removing (deleting) my large number of breakpoints resolved the excessive load time and compile time.
This action reduced the size of the .suo file from 214MB to 977KB. Let VS handle the .suo file itself.
Compiling and loading now takes < 1 minute instead of 5-10 minutes for a solution with 35 projects. Visual Studio 2012 Pro, update 4.
None of the other answers worked for me. CI compile times were fine, but loading my solution in Visual Studio was taking almost two minutes. VS would then operate just fine until I closed and opened the solution the next time. Different versions of VS all showed the same problem and both safe mode and deleting the suo didn't help.
I ended up following the advice in http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2014/04/30/156156.aspx to use Windows Performance Recorder to instrument VS and find the problem. By looking in Windows Performance Analyzer under the "CPU Usage (Sampled)" section and adding the "Stack (Frame Tags)" column, I was able to dig into the usage of devenv.exe.
Turns out the hot path by count had Microsoft.VisualStudio.Platform.WindowManagement.ni.dll 23 calls down, and below that eventually Microsoft.VisualStudio.ServerExplorer.dll and Microsoft.VisualStudio.Data.Package.dll. That pointed me to look in Server Explorer in the UI and open the Data Connections tab. There I found hundreds of mistakenly added connections that came from the debug web.config's ConnectionString section. Removing those from web.config reduced the load of that individual project from 90+ seconds to almost instant.
I have a different cause for the slow loading of the projects.
My situation is utilizing Git and found that even switching branches was slower than it should be with project load.
Solution: Run Visual Studio as Administrator
Reason: Something with the Corporate laptop is not providing the needed Git tool access (it doesn't recognize that a git repository is in use).
I have not seen any issues with Git or my personal access to any of the project files or Git objects.
I tried the above, but it didn't solve my problem.
Here's how I got around this problem, hopefully it will work for some of you as well:
Open Visual Studio 2013 with no solution.
Create a new C# Console application and save it.
Close Visual Studio.
Reopen the Console solution created in step 2.
Close Visual Studio.
Reopen the solution that was previously hanging on the Preparing Solution dialogue. Mine opened right away, no more hanging.
Using Visual Studio 2015, I ended up creating a new solution, adding the existing projects.
Deleting the *.suo from gehho's answer helped in the past, but didn't help me in this case. There's also another .suo file in a hidden .vs folder at the root of the solution.
There are other answers here for Visual Studio 2015 Visual Studio 2015 is extremely slow
For my case it was due to TFS issue. It thinks that there are more than 5000 pending changes.
The fix is to force TFS to recheck. Go to Team Explorer -> Source Control Explorer and do "Get Latest" on the projects that have pending changes. For things that are already matching TFS, Visual Studio will actually not download anything to your PC. For things that are different with TFS, Visual Studio will let you know and ask you to reconcile the difference.
This is VS 2019 Professional.
In my case there were <import ...> entries in the project files that pointed to
paths no longer available making the loading of the solution hang indefinitely without any form of information give (Shame on Microsoft!).
I encountered this problem only recently (Mar 2021), using VS 2019. It literarily takes 30+ seconds to load the file (each).
It only effects the Layout files. I believe it could be to do with the links within the files. I have not had time to investigate them.
However, I am writing this to suggest that regardless of the cause of the problem, a simple solution is to right click on the file and open it with Notepad to get your work done.
I have problem with Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7 64-bit. After some time of work VS starts consuming ~50% CPU and UI responding slows down. When I close VS then UI disappear but process stay.
When I forgot to kill those hung processes at the end of day, I will end up with numerous devenv.exe processes.
I have reinstall Visual Studio and reinstall Windows and ended up with the same problem... doesn't change anything. Please help. :/
Remove and/or uninstall all third-party Visual Studio add-ins and extensions. Disabling is not good enough.
Visual Studio 2010 relies heavily on graphics. Therefore:
Update your video driver.
Turn off "Enable rich client visual
experience"
Turn off "Use Hardware graphics acceleration if
available"
There are also temporary files that Visual Studio uses that may need to be cleared out.
Clear out your %temp% folder.
Clear out %AppData%\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache
Clear out %AppData%\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ProjectAssemblies
Your project and solution user settings may be corrupt due to so many "crashes".
Delete .user and .suo files (you will lose the startup project, bookmarks, breakpoints, and other user settings specific to projects and solutions.)
Begin where you began before - it may seem overkill but this is the only way to be sure we are addressing everything short of hardware issues.
Reinstall Windows - make sure you are using a validly licensed copy, and patch the hell out of it before installing Visual Studio.
Note: I doubt it is a GPU driver issue, but it never hurts to use the most up to date driver and this is the place to do it right after a fresh OS install.
Install Visual Studio .Net 2010 but do not start it up. Let it get the frameworks installed fresh.
Use Windows Update to install the VS 2010 SP1 patch, and any/all patches for .Net frameworks.
Make an images for yourself right here so you have something to build from if you need to try this again. It will save you lots of time.
Fire up Visual Studio, and test your closing before installing anything else.
If it does not work here, there's likely some conflict between PC hardware and window OS, and you should try to find this symptom in other applications to get more info.
Here's what i would be looking for:
Does it happen EVERY TIME?
Does it happen after you debug your project ? does it happen for ALL projects?
Does it also happen when you don't load any projects? (simply start the IDE and wait).
Does it happen after a debug session of your application? maybe the application is not closed properly?
Do you have any other apps running at the same time that may cause this? try reproducing with a minimal set of apps/services running.
What are you doing exactly when it starts freezing ? anything in particular?
I would try to get 2-3 memory dumps at the time of hanging, post it here as well as to MSFT people. That would be a good start.
This is something that is bothering me quite a bit, because it slows down VS start up and add to system noise. I have a Western Digital drive that goes to sleep when not in use. This drive is for data only, Visual Studio or any of its components were never installed on it. No files VS solutions use (including source/project files) were ever on that drive. So Visual Studio should not try to access it. But every time I start VS, it causes that drive to spin up. Why does it do that and how can I stop it? This happens in both VS 2008 and 2010, but I'm most concerned with 2010 right now.
Update: Alright, just promoting some new information from comments and updating the intended question.
The reason it spins up the drive is that it queries all drives for available space. Is there a setting for this somewhere? It sure doesn't look like the usual config dialog has it.
Also, for people voting to close. Why would SO have Visual Studio tags (so popular too) if we aren't allowed to ask VS questions?
I'm having a problem where VS2010 Ultimate is freezing up every so often for several seconds before returning to normal operation. This happens several times during a session, and is obviously very annoying. I haven't been able to pin it down to any specific activity-- it seems to hang whenever I scroll around in a document, open/create a document, basically anything. Anyone else have this issue or know what might be the cause?
Incompatible add-ons or system configurations can cause Visual Studio issues (performance issue, error, etc).
Fortunately we can try to troubleshoot the issues by referring to the Visual Studio activity log.
Simply run the following command to run Visual Studio 2010 and log its all activities.
DevEnv.exe /log
The log file will be generated to:
XP
%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Visual Studio\10.0\ActivityLog.xml
Vista & Windows 7
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ActivityLog.xml
Once you run it, 2 files will be generated: ActivityLog.xml and ActivityLog.xsl
And when you open the ActivityLog.xml, it will contain something like this:
The problem was solved by deleting the user options file called SolutionName.suo.
Somehow it had gotten very big and probably corrupted. You will only lose your breakpoints and open files as far as I know, but rename it to be safe.
I know people have had problems with computers that are older or don't have as much RAM. I know my use of VS 2010 ultimate can run to 500 MB's sometimes and if you don't have enough RAM, then it will hang for a little.
I've had issues with VS2010 when debugging is running or if I'm opening files from a network drive. I'm not sure as I currently don't have any team server repos connected, but if you do maybe the connection to the repo might be an issue as well.
Turns out the issue was network related. One item in my solution was looking to a mapped network drive, which apparently didn't always respond fast enough.
My solution for that problem was beyond the scope of my thinking. I found it on this website, and it goes like:
Launch Internet Explorer. Go to Internet Options, then Advanced tab. Under the Security group, untick “Check for server certificate revocation“. You may need to restart Visual Studio.
My scenario is that I have network drives with references mapped via VPN. That should have to do with that.
I faced similar issue with Visual Studio 2008. I have not thoroughly investigated the issue though.
Reading your post it seems the behavior at your PC is really annoying, but for me it's not that frequent.
One thing I noticed, the frequency at which this happens is dependent on the RAM size and time elapsed since last setup. I came to this conclusion seeing the performance of machines of my colleagues.
I noticed that my anti-virus software tends to lock down my entire system sometimes. If you have an anti-virus application, you might try disabling it for a moment to see if it is the culprit.
I had a similar issue - that still happened after a /resetsettings, reinstall and using /safemode. For me, the issue was that Assembly Binding logging was turned on ago and I forgot to turn it off, it got to the stage where the log files concerned were >200MB and each append was taking ages...
Managed to find the issue with procmon from sysinternals. Suggest that anyone who comes across a similar issue tries procmon if none of the above solutions help.
My VS2010 would hang as well in a similar fashion.
DevEnv.exe /log would indicate it failed to load strings around the time it would hang.
Reinstalling VS2010 SP1 and deinstalling Resharper to install Resharper 7.1.3 solved the problem.