Assuming we have to stay on Windows XP x86, what would be the best spec for working in Visual Studio 2010 with ReSharper, PowerTool and a couple of other smaller add-ons?
Components we can upgrade are:
CPU
RAM
HDD
Graphics
At the moment, I have a Pentium Dual-Core E5300 2.6GHz with 4GB RAM and ReSharper makes Visual Studio crash in a solution of around 2000 files.
Really should be moving to Win 7, or at least Win Vista. There is MASSIVE improvements in VS just by running on top of those.
As you stated XP x86, some suggestions:
Ram: 4Gb as fast as you can get. This is important but also only depends on number of VS instances and solution size. At 4Gb I would suggest staying in the low solution bracket (< 25 projects).
CPU: Fast as you can get. Multi core helps a bit, but a lot of the VS UI is single threaded on the GUI.
HDD: VS is a harddrive monster, so fast hard drive. SSD especially here. Spend the money here FIRST. R# perf bottle neck is the file scanning so this will help with this too.
Graphics: Far more important than you would think, mostly due to the fact VS uses WPF and hardware acceleration. Very important to get a good graphics card with STABLE drivers. VS 2010 SP1 disables hardware acceleration on XP by default (can be turned on in the settings) because so many VS 2010 crashes on XP are from unstable graphic drivers and WPF hits those issues a lot. If you get a good stable one, turn that setting on!
Another issue is also just regular restarts, VS does a lot in memory and isn't too good at cleaning up. So the stack fills quickly and it will crash often (PerfWaston is looking for this info) so a restart every so often helps.
As I said at the start your best bet is also one of the cheapest (compared to new hardware) upgrade to Win7, especially x64. More RAM, better SSD support, more stable OS, there is a lot in there that will help your VS experience be faster and more stable.
I would highly recommend moving to 64-bit. Even if you just have 4GB addressable ram with Visual studio, it will have access to more memory if you get more than 4GB of RAM.
Also, get faster hard drives. SSD or RAID 5. I'd pick this over a faster CPU.
Related
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 am on Resharper 4.x and VS2008.
R# seems to slow down the living crap out of VS2008. And of course, the memory usage can easily go to 500MB on a middle of the road Winforms solution with 7-8 projects.
Now that Resharper 5.x is out, can anyone tell me whether either perf or memory issues have been improved for use with VS2008?
I believe R#5 memory usage is better than the earlier versions but still too slow for me. I'm using it with VS2010 on a decent machine (quad core, 7200rpm HDD, 4GB ram). Using a solid state drive might help.
It is faster, and not so hungry for RAM, but I have tweaked its code inspection a bit.
I am on Resharper 6.1, and there are still OutOfMemoryException issues. JetBrains claims this is an issue with Visual Studio process fragmentation.
http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/ReSharper/OutOfMemoryException+Fix
(Hope to be non OT)
Hi, i'm a little exasperated about running vs.net 2008 on an acer aspire with an intel t2350.
I know, this hardware is not the "last" and the best we can find on the market. So i'm thinking to buy a new notebook.
For your experience, which type of processor i can buy ?
I found, here in italy, acer notebook between 350-500 euros with t4400 and 2-3 gb ram.
Is it enough to have a good "working experience" with vs (with good i intend not to wait 10-20 seconds when i switch from asp.net design to asp.net source code) ?
Any answer is appreciated
I think it relies in the weight of the solution you're working on.
Switching from asp design to source code is really slow. Personally, I had bad experiences and I don not find productive using the design view. I used VS2008 in machines with a really good hardware configuration and this 'switching' still slow, it must be a bug.
In this link you can find the 'official' info that you're looking for.
Also I found that there was an effort to reduce that loading time, but in my opinion, is not enough.
I think this belongs in SuperUser forum.
Here are the minumum requirements for:
VS 2010
VS 2008:
Computer with a 1.6 GHz or faster
processor Visual Studio 2008 can be
installed on the following operating
systems: Windows Vista® (x86 & x64) -
all editions except Starter Edition
Windows® XP (x86 & x64) with Service
Pack 2 or later - all editions except
Starter Edition Windows Server® 2003
(x86 & x64) with Service Pack 1 or
later (all editions) Windows Server
2003 R2 (x86 and x64) or later (all
editions) 384 MB of RAM or more (768
MB of RAM or more for Windows Vista)
2.2 GB of available hard-disk space 5400 RPM hard drive
Just about any machine with 2GB of RAM will run the actual Visual Studio editor just fine.
However, development systems rarely stop at just a single editor. You might typically have two or three instances of the editor, plus a web browser or two, a task management system, a web server and a database engine, and maybe an additional VM or two. Not to mention power left over to actually run, debug, and compile the app you're working on.
Because the load here is typically spread over several apps/processes, a development machine can generally make pretty good use of a quad code processor with at least 4GB of RAM.
If you're developing with less than 4gb and a 64 bit OS you're living in 1996.
64bit, 4gb of memory.
I find using a Solid State hard drive do alot for the performance. That and 4gb of ram and a decent CPU and you a good to go!
I have a Windows XP machine with a dual core 3.6G CPU and 4megs. I am not very happy with the performance. I was wondering if compilation in VS 2010 is multithreaded and does VS 2010 benefit from switching from dual to quad core machine?
What language are you working in? The native C++ compiler will spawn off multiple processes when you build. In VS 2008 it was one project per core; now it will use multiple cores even if you have only one (presumably huge) project. I don't think managed code does.
A helpful blog entry on what hardware will be useful with VS 2010 is http://blogs.msdn.com/ddperf/archive/2008/12/23/visual-studio-2010-hardware-requirements.aspx for more.
You'd probably get a bigger speed up from changing your hard disk (i.e., to SSD) and installing VS and putting your projects on that disk. It'll speed up the Intellisense cache and what-not. If you're on XP rather than Vista or Windows 7 too, the shell on VS2010 was rewritten to use WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and WPF is not optimised for XP; it will run slower.
Compilation of large projects tends to be very disk-intensive. Getting a faster disk will speed up the build process.
Skip SSD and buy more RAM and put all your projects on RamDisk like SoftPerfect RAMDisk
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.