I checked out some of the performance profilers mentioned here. But...
EQATec didn't work for me because I have many assemblies I want to profile, and it has a limit on assemblies to profile. How much of a hassle is getting a free license? I'd go for it if someone guaranteed me that EQATec can profile both managed and unmanaged code
SlimTune only profiled my managed code, even if I set "Profile native functions" to "True"
XTE Profiler is no longer free
We have a copy of AQTime 6 we bought before, but it doesn't seem to support .NET 4.0 apps (it can't even start my app)
We use Visual Studio 2010 Professional SP1, so we don't have the Visual Studio profiler
I tried the "poor man's profiling" (halting the program many times and seeing where it is), but I get way too random results and I'm more used to traditional profiling
(I've spent the whole day stumped on this, sorry if I was too negative)
UPDATE: After I cleaned my solution, built it again and checked all debug info (.pdb) was copied to the same directory as the executable, I tried AQTime again and it worked! It showed me routine timing info for both managed and unmanaged code, so my problem is solved. However, I'm using a paid profiler, so the question will remain open until I take a look at xperf or someone comes up with something else
AQTime have a free version of their latest profiler (http://smartbear.com/products/free-tools/aqtime-standard/) It supports .Net 4, But I doubt it can do a mixed profile of Native and Managed.
If you are really serious about it you might look into the Microsoft xperf tools (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance). They have a steep learning curve but they are free and I doubt any commercial profiler can do what xperf can (the instrumentation is in the OS, not in a separate process, thus either Vista, win7 or win2K8 are required). I'm waiting for someone to write a nice GUI around it, but it's taking a bit long... ;-)
xperf will profile your native code and you can load your symbols into the result viewer. I don't think it will go down to per-line granularity though. It has has a .Net CLR Provider (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264809.aspx). The cool thing about xperf is that it can also show other processes that may be influencing your performance (you are free to switch it off and only profile your own process). For example: it is capable of revealing that your IO is slow due to a badly written USB driver, virus scanner or firewall software. A traditional profiler would only show the slow IO, causing you to focus on a non-bottleneck.
By the way, there is also an ICorProfilerCallback interface you can utilize to write your own profiler (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s5ec0es1.aspx).
I' pretty sure the answer to your question is "There isn't one".
In comparing a whole bunch of .NET profilers a few months ago I found only very few could do mixed .NET/native profiling: AQTime ($599) and Glowcode ($499) could. Or so they say - I didn't try it.
EQATEC, Visual Studio, ANTS, Jetbrains dotTrace, Yourkit, XteProfiler, Slimtune etc could not, so I doubt you'll find a free profiler anytime soon that can.
CLR Profiler 4 by Microsoft is free. Have you tried it?
What do you look for in the unmanaged part of the profiler?
Your concern about EQATEC Profiler is easily resolved: it only does managed .NET profiling, not at all any kind of unmanaged profiling.
As shown in the pricing the actual profiling functionality differs only in the number of assemblies that can be profiled at once. So a $0 Free edition profiles a single-assembly WP7-app just as fine as a $999 Corporate edition does. For the extra price tag you get to profile more assemblies at once and a handful secondary features, like print, compare, min/max etc.
Getting a free license by trying out EQATEC Analytics is said to be easy. Going for the unlimited Corporate license is quite a popular choice and many have achieved it in just a couple of hours. Getting a free $99 Standard license shouldn't take more than 10 minutes or so, if you're good. Please note: I work at EQATEC and we actually hand out so many free licenses every day now that's it's almost become a burden because each is manually processed (yes, seriously!) so this particular offer may not go on forever.
OP: "I'd go for it if someone guaranteed me that XXXX can profile both managed and unmanaged code"
Our C# Timing Profiler is not dependent on how your C# code is compiled (managed or unmanaged, or mixed). It should work fine for this.
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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.
I am currently using VS2010 Premium, and have heard that the debugging in Ultimate is so much better. Is it really worth upgrading to Ultimate to take advantage of the new debugging features they've included? Or is it marketing hype and not really usable for every day development scenarios?
I believe the feature is called IntelliTrace.
Do you work in a team? Do you get bugs reported to you by a tester, and then you can't repro them? Would it save you a lot of time to be able to "debug" through the actual setup the tester had - see their values and execution path? Or perhaps you work with another developer. Would you like to be able to set a bunch of breakpoints and leave "notes" in the code (pinned data tips) and then export them and give them to the other developer, saying "the bug we're looking for is in your part of the code".
If those scenarios cause you pain now, you want Ultimate. If you work alone, it's possible that IntelliTrace alone will make you want Ultimate. It is cool to "time travel" in the debugger.
If you are heavily working on Linq to SQL / Linq to entities then IntelliTrace feature will surely helpful.
Then you should upgrade.
they have quite a few named advantages in this site http://c.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/csharp-l/whats-new-in-vs2010-and-is-it-worth-upgrading-3531098#M3669289
IntelliTrace is the only way to download the crash and other event logs from Windows Azure. The devFabric isnt quite a 100% representation of the azure deployment environment. I have used the Intellitrace to find deployment flubs quickly. When everything takes 20 minutes to deploy, having a tool that saves you 1 or 2 deployment cycles pays for itself quickly.
I saw that Beta 1 of VS2010 was publicly availible.
My question to those of you who has tried it is: does it work good?
Will it cause my computer to blow up in tiny pieces? Will it crash randomly? Will it work with some minor glitches? Or is it just perfect from bottom up?
I'm only coding school- and hobby-stuff, so nothing that someones life depend upon, but i still want software that works. How close to a final product is it? Is it worth trying?
It's a bit slow, and there's no offline MSDN, but it's worth trying IMO. Having said that it's slow, I still use it on my NC10 netbook, so it's clearly not that bad :)
I've got it side-by-side VS2008, and that hasn't caused any problems.
I've seen a couple of glitches (once the keyboard handling went completely wonky) but it's certainly usable. The main question is what you want to get out of trying it - in my case I absolutely need to code against C# 4 to explore the new features. I do most of that from the command line in fact, where the speed of VS obviously isn't an issue, but it's nice to see the VS-specific features as well (like the debug threading views for Parallel Extensions).
It seems more or less usable on the .NET side. The C++ side is a bit more sketchy. On one hand, they've added support for some very nice new C++0x features, on the other, they've broken some absolute fundamentals.
Your plain old main function won't compile in 32-bit with unicode enabled. (Workarounds: Either compile as 64-bit, disable unicode, or rename the function to wmain).
This seems to me to be a strong hint that the C++ side of things is nowhere near release-worthy. I'd probably wait for beta2 before doing any serious work with that.
I would say it is great, but the performance hurts a bit.
Here is an idea for you: Install it into a VirtualPC. Then you can play and not care what it does. You don't like it, delete the VPC image and keep on trucking. That is how I play with Microsoft betas now. I never install them on any real machine - too risky.
Usable: Yes.
Recommended: Not if you'r a touchpad-addict or dislike crashing apps.
I've been trying it for 2 weeks now coding small C#-projects and these are my impressions
Reasons to use 2010:
Looks good
Multi monitor support
I can see myself using the code templating but right now i couldnt find any really useful stuff except for reducing the fontsize of comments.
Zoom in the editor
Select a variable and then press shift+up/down to go to next usage of this variable
Ctrl+, brings up instant search of classes and functions in the entire project. (i've become really addicted to this)
Floating watches for single objects
Reasons to not use 2010:
TOUCHPAD SCROLL DOESN'T WORK IN THE EDITOR!!! (this is reason enough to not upgrade if you are using it on a laptop)
I've had some random app-crashes in the middle of just writing code, once or twice per day maybe.
UI sometimes freezes randomly for about 30seconds and then returns to normal.
It started to use 100% CPU power from one of my cores once when it was minimized in basic editing-mode and i was doing other stuff in other programs, i only noticed it because the fan started to go wild.
Otherwhise it's pretty similar to 2008. I haven't noticed any difference in speed like other people say.
You need to ask yourself: what is the advantage for you in using VS2010 over VS2008? I would suggest that there is no advantage if all you are doing is "school- and hobby-stuff".
I'm still using VS2008 for business related stuff (and, indeed, VC6 for some stuff). I prefer to wait until all the early adopters have tested it (and Microsoft has released at least one service pack after the real product release) before I do their testing for them.
It seems to co-exist with other versions of VS without causing any problems.
Regarding the slowness - it seems to be the UI that is slow, rather than building. Once it's going it doesn't seem much slower on my fast quadcore. I've yet to try it on my laptop.
It's usable enough, the small glitches that I've encounter weren't that bad. However, certain VS extensions(like XNA) don't work in VS2010 at the moment.
It's fun to toy with. Not usable for me, cause re#er does not support it yet (had to install TestDriven .NET which works through keyboard shortcuts only to run my tests).
Gave me an insight how addicted I am. :/
Btw, on Win7, without virtual pc it seemed even faster than vs2008 for me.
VS2010 doesn't yet support mobile device projects, which might or might not matter to you.
VC++ wise - VS2010 has a built-in 64-bit compiler, VS2008 does not.
You can supposedly add 64-bit support to VS2008, but it takes some effort.
I've been using VS 2010 beta (with .NET 4.0 beta) on Windows 7 RC. I've been trying to rewrite parts of a large-scale business application in it to see what can be done with it.
The UI freezes frequently. I'm talking 1-10 minutes between freezes. The UI does not come back, so I'm forced to kill devenv.exe every time it happens. Microsoft probably puts my error reports in their spam folder by now.
For me, VS 2010 beta 1 classifies as unusable. However, it's fast, the new IDE functions are very handy, and it's pretty. I keep coming back to it despite my resolutions to wait for a stable build.
I have a Visual Studio 2005 Solution workspace which in turn has 8 projects included in it. I want to profile the complete code(all the projects) and get some measure about the absolute cycles taken by each function to execute, or at least percentage cycle consumptions.
I checked out help for VS 2005, and also the project setiings options but could not find any pointers on hwo to get the profile info.
Any help regarding this would be beneficial.
-AD.
If your application is not particularly processor intensive, redgate ANTS Profiler is a good choice - the line-by-line stats can come in quite handy, and the whole product is clean and well-designed.
If your app needs a lot of CPU to operate normally, however, most of the .NET profilers on the market won't be able to handle it. The only two that I have ever found that will work for a really heavy-weight application are JetBrains dotTrace and YourKit. The two are very similar, which is not surprising, given that YourKit seems to have been started by a former JetBrains employee. I personally prefer dotTrace, but that may just be because that is what I used first, and there has never been any good reason to switch.
I have tested ANTS, AQTime, DevPartner, GlowCode, Borland OptimizeIt and Intel VTune, and all of them have too much overhead to handle a demanding application. (VTune is a possible exception, but it is so horribly complex to configure and use that I was never able to figure out exactly what it could handle. It is also very expensive.)
I guess the inbuilt profiler of Visual Studio 2005 comes onyl with the Developer Edition and Team Edition. I have a Professional edition which, it seems doesnot have the inbuilt profiler tool.
-AD
I've used both the profiler in Compuware’s DevPartner (I like to still call it “TrueTime”) and Rational's Quantify. I always liked Quantify better, but as I've moved between companies DevPartner is usually already the “standard”.
Both are expensive, but they (seem to) add so much value that any commercial shop should have no problem investing in some seats.
Quantify didn’t require special rebuilds of the project – which was GREAT. It also crashed less (that’s not saying much, it had its own issues). DevPartner also tends to break as each new version of Visual Stuido was release (maybe this is better now?). Buy the yearly maintenance agreement if you go this way.
That said, I’ve often just write a class remembers the time at construction and spits out (log file) the elapsed time in its destructor. I used QueryPerformanceCounter. I’d stick this class at the top of the function I’d want to time. You could get fancy with making it a macro, use the preprocessor to include this class only under a special build…
I recommend you EQATEC profiler which also includes in its site a tracer.
Also it's free and easy to use.
alt text http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler/profiler-logo.gif
We use DevPartner with Visual Studio 2005. It gives you performance analysis of the specific projects in your solution you want to look at. We also use it for memory management analysis, and error analysis. Is commercial tool, so it's not free.
Red-gate's Profiler is great for this.
I use Jebrains profiler is very easy to use and performs very well too.
If your app needs a lot of CPU to operate normally, however, most of the .NET profilers on the market won't be able to handle it.
I have used a trial version of RedGate Ant's profiler on an optimizing algorithm that normally uses up to 100% CPU on a single core machines and though slow it managed to get through and report all I needed to know. Extremely helpfull tool. I wonder what kind of algorithms have you run on the Ant's profiler.
Has anyone used the VS profiler ?
It is slow to load anything other than a small project. It is slow to quit; it can sometimes take minutes. It can be slow to open new files. The record macro feature used to be useful. It is now so slow to start up it's almost always quicker to do it manually!
More info would be helpful. How big are your solutions? What platform are you on. What 3rd party plugins are you running? What else is running on your pc?
3.2GHz P4 Hyperthreaded, 2GB RAM. Running Outlook, Perforce, IE7, directory browsers. Usually have 1-3 instances of VS running. It's much slower than VC6, say. It seems to take a long time to load projects and close down. I'm interested in if people know reasons why this happens, because of the way VS is written. Is it using .net internally and GC slows it down?
One of the biggest culprits for Visual Studio 2005 slowness is Intellisense. This has been brought up on the MSDN forums again and again and again. What I frequently experience is that Intellisense is working nearly non-stop to "re-index" symbols (or whatever you call it). But developers at Microsoft have not been deaf to the complaints and some outgoing folks there have come up with some workarounds that have helped me and might help you:
Check out this link to get a better understanding of Intellisense:
Intellisense Info
Then check out this link for some macros that I've had a lot of success with:
Intellisense Macros
With those macros, you can turn off intellisense (without renaming any DLLs), restart it, delete the ncb file (which you can do manually, but this is a convenience) and it can give you the status of Intellisense.
it might be that you have a plugin that is misbehaving. Try the safemode switch to see if this improves performance
One of the biggest culprits for Visual Studio 2005 slowness is Intellisense. This has been brought up on the MSDN forums again and again and again. What I frequently experience is that Intellisense is working nearly non-stop to "re-index" symbols [...]
I agree. I use Visual Assist. It is much better. There is no real way to turn "Intellisense" off either. The only way I have found is to rename the DLL so when you restart VS it is not found. This works and makes VS faster.
I tend to agree that VS is a heavyweight. Back in the day I coded in DOS using Boxer text editor and makefiles. Boxer didn't have the heavy intellisense and refactoring features, but it did better in the text editing department, had good syntax highlighting and startup/closing were instantaneous, even on a 486. ...those were the days.
I would say it would be really nice to customize VS to remove all the overhead you're never going to use anyway, but I don't see that happening.
here's ya problem:
3.2GHz P4 Hyperthreaded, 2GB RAM
Hypertheaded means "doesn't actually have two CPU's, but it fakes it". If you have a process with just one thread running, then you get bad performance. It was a good short-term measure, but compared to having two REAL CPU's, it's a slow hack.
I don't think that's the problem at all. The machine is plenty high spec enough to be professional C++ development machine for large projects. I can run Eclipse (which is Java, which is memory hungry and slower than native code) and this is still way faster than VS 2005.
I doubled the amount of RAM from 1GB to 2GB. This helps a lot with linking large applications. We also use Incredibuild to accelerate compilation. But it's the VS app that is slow.
And if you think I'm a grumpy anti-MS zealot, ask yourself why people aren't buying Vista! :)
I'm am seeing mixed results with faster machines. Sure, faster machine, hides the poor performance quality of vs2005 but not all.
Simply taking your obligatory "hello world" C/C++ program, just compile it, (CL /c helloword.cpp),
#include <stdio.h>
#include <windows.h>
int main(char argc, char *argv[])
{
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}
I see 1 seconds compiler under Vc6 and a 6 seconds compile under VS2005.
Using DEPENDS to profile the two, I see 3 areas where the 5 seconds delays and time different are taking place:
~2.5 secs with ADVAPI32.DLL, CryptGetHashParam()
~1.5 secs with OLE2.DLL, StringFromGUID2()
~1.0 secs with C2.DLL, _AbortCompilerPass()
Again, this is just a compile, not a link. The VC8+ compiler executables/dlls are referencing sub-systems like crypto API, the Registry for some transparent reason and it is adding a tremendous amount of overhead to straight and pure compiles.
While a faster machine may hide some of hide slow down, one could only wonder if Microsoft can optimize the compiler by offering options that disables unnecessary overhead references. I understand the better compiler comes with some overhead, but what I see is a 300-500% compile time degradation - thats awful.
Hector Santos, CTO
Santronics Software
This is a purely subjective thing I am afraid.
May it is because of your low end system configuration.
May be VS trying to get updates from the net?
May be you are running too many application in the background.
May be you are trying to open a huge solution.
Recently I've had both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 on my machine, and I agree that VS2005 is really heavy. They improved upon it in VS2008, although I'm not sure if you'll consider the performance improvements enough.
Could you maybe time some operations and post them so we get an idea what you mean by "slow"? On my machine, I wouldn't call VS 2005 slow, but if you compare it to notepad or my web browser it seems slow. Here's some things that might help people figure out what's going on:
Turn off any features that could affect load time. This includes uninstalling all add-ons and making sure that VS isn't configured to automatically open a project.
Reboot your machine.
Time how long it starts VS 2005 to start, from the time you click the icon until the program starts.
Create a program that you're willing to post here that seems to compile slowly (this might not be possible depending on what it takes to make a slow compile); post the program and how long it takes your computer to build it.
Do you know anyone else with the same kind of machine that has VS 2005 installed? Does it seem slower or faster than yours?
I believe Lord Kelvin said the best thing that can be said about situations like this:
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge of it is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced it to the stage of science.
Until you give us some measurements to look at, we can't tell you if your machine is genuinely slow or if you are expecting more out of your machine than it can give. Your HT CPU might be the problem; I have roughly equivalent machines at work and at home, but my dual-core work machine runs circles around my single-core home machine when it comes to running VS.
VS 2005 is slower than VS 6 because it is less well optimized for speed. The developers of VS 6 had slower machines than the developers of VS 2005. They made it fast "enough" back then. On a modern machine VS is now "pleasantly fast", where VS 2005 is only just fast enough.
What annoys me is that they decided to scrap VS 6 and start again for VS 2005, when VS 6 was an awesome piece of software that just needed updating.
I noticed above you mentioned you are using perforcet too. Do projects load faster when not in perforce, I am willing to bet that some of the delay you are seeing is related to perforce during load. The latest version of perforce seems a lot slower too.
Change your Solution Platform on "Any CPU" option which is given on the top of Visual Studio then your program build speed will be definitely increased.
here's ya problem:
3.2GHz P4 Hyperthreaded, 2GB RAM
Hypertheaded means "doesn't actually have two CPU's, but it fakes it". If you have a process with just one thread running, then you get bad performance. It was a good short-term measure, but compared to having two REAL CPU's, it's a slow hack.
2GB of RAM would be an issue too, based on what you said you run. If you have a basic 5400RPM disk, then it's going to make it all worse.
I'd recommend, based on what you posted:
A good core2 machine, maybe a quad if you have the budget.
3GB of ram if you are running a 32bit OS, 4+GB if you are running x64. 4GB means you waste 1GB under 32bit.
Get 7200RPM disks, or better. If you can, RAID0 them (stripe) or RAID0+1 (stripe+mirror) if you can get 4 drives (stripe == split content over the two disks, so you can read from both at the same time. stripe+mirror == the safe version of striping, so your code is on TWO disks at all times)
I have a 2.0ghz Core2 (so roughly 3-4x the performance of your P4, if you count 2 CPU's(cores) to be 2x) with 2GB, and the most I can run well is 2 instances of VS.NET 2008. This is normal - nothing wrong with VS.NET, it's just a huge app.
More RAM. More CPU. More Screen. More. More. More :)