My team is currently using VS2005 with the following development PCs that are a few years old: XP, Pentium D 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM.
My gut tells me that this is going to be poor hardware for VS2010 development. I am not running VS2010 beta but I am running Blend 3 beta and the performance is bad.
Can you point me to anything that I can show my boss to convince him to buy 6 new machines for my team?
Edit below after initial answer from Jon:
I should have added that my boss wants to upgrade current machines with new hard-drives so I am trying to use this opportunity to take a look forward and see if a HD upgrade is really worth it. This HD upgrade would not just be simple installation of 2nd drive but would replace current drive and would involve backup/restore or reinstallation headaches. There would be the added benefit of 64bit development too, something that we have been talking about.
Betas typically are bad in terms of performance. I know that MS is working hard to improve the performance of VS2010.
However, I have the beta running on my Samsung NC-10 netbook, so it does work on low spec machines.
Do you already find yourself frequently waiting for your machine to catch up? If so, that's the reason to give your manager: you'll be more efficient now with a new machine. If not, wait until VS2010 is out and you actually have it installed (will you even upgrade immediately?) - then if it's too slow, you can show that to your manager at that point.
Speculatively requesting an upgrade doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Given that those Pentium-Ds are dual core processors, I'd suggest:
maxing out the RAM
Windows 7 x64
separate faster HDDs
Those CPUs, while not at the top of the list, are decently powerful. They should handle today's workload of VS2005/2008 without much problems.
It's likely back to the RAM and probably HDD speeds. I know you didn't mention HDD at all, but consider 2 drives (OS and data) an SSD drive instead.
I realize this isn't a direct answer to your question of how to convince your boss to kick out the money, but if that doesn't work, perhaps this will help in terms of getting more performance.
Even though I'm late a little, I guess I need to add that MS is really working hard to improve the performance of VS2010, but they aren't successful here. Using WPF slowed VS 2010 down a lot.
My experience shows that VS2010 has the only drawback, it's slow. Therefore, the developer machine should be based on Nehalem processor core at least and possess 4Gb memory.
Anyway VS2005 is not the best choice. VS2008 is much more mature.
Related
I'm planning on buying a new PC for programming under Visual Studio 2010. My main other usages are:
Programming under Microsoft Visual Studio.
Running VMWare Virtual Machines.
Probably multi-monitor (if my budget lets me buy an extra one)
Here are my questions:
Do I need to purchase a high performance display adapter considering my usage described above? or a medium-range one will suffice? In general, I'd like to know how much a display adapter could affect my usages?
Which CPU could perform better? Core i7, Core 2 Quad, AMD? I have a limited budget but I really need a good performance and buying a good CPU/MB/RAM is my first priority.
A good video card is not a must have, unless you want to develop advanced 3D with Visual Studio (which is an option after all). WPF and multi-monitor can work on any video card you would buy nowadays.
What is an absolute requirement is 4GB of RAM, just for Visual Studio 2010 alone under Win7 (x64 obviously, since the x86 version cannot use 4GB of RAM). Adding Virtual machines raises that need. This has no up limit since it really depends on how many VMs you're planning to run at the same time and what application will run on them. Add 1GB minimum per VM running Win7, a lot more if they are supposed to run databases, source control or any heavy load application.
Also, for the VMs, it is almost mandatory to have them use separate physical hard drives if they are going to run simultaneously, if you don't you will experience stone age level disk performance for both the host and the VMs (unless it's all on SSD, which I never tried).
Would I be buying a computer for programming now I would definitely buy an SSD to host Win7, VS and the projects, it would really be comfy (my current desktop takes several minutes to boot and load my projects, anything that improves loading is good).
On the CPU side, you might want to spend money on the number of cores rather than the actual speed (frequency) of the processor. All CPUs have decent performance, but your computer may slow down a lot if you're running several VMs on a 2-core CPU.
the i7 chip is a really good one, but I don't think you would gain a lot buy spending big amounts of money on high-end Intel chips. Go for a good price/perf ratio with lots of cores, which for your budget will be a 4-core i5 or a 6-core Phenom II X6 (I personnally would prefer the X6 but I don't want to sound partial).
More generally, if your host or your VMs are meant to run stuff DBs or continuous integration build or source control servers that are accessible to a lot of people, you might want to use another computer as your developping computer, since availability will be important (that means no reboots, avoid hardware and software failures). You might want to buy a good mobo, and an excellent power supply, plus a good tower with sufficiently numerous fans. And you might want to think of what you're going to use for backups.
Edit: this last line almost excludes pre-built computers, since afaik computer makers will almost always include cheap power supply and motherboard even in high-end computers, because those points are not advertised.
Another thing to look for is drive speed. Visual Studio does a lot of writing and reading to disk so get the fastest you can. SSD is ideal.
With the exception of the amazing graphics card, the same rules for gaming setups apply for development environments. The more resources (RAM) the better, move your default Windows page file location to a drive other than the C: drive, use an SDD or if you cannot afford one then try a hybrid 7200rpm / 4GB SSD drive such as the Momentus made Seagate which will not break the bank.
A lot of people agree that with the 64bit era, memory is the new disk. 48GB will cost around $700 at the moment but this will drop rapidly over the coming months due to a better acceptance of 64bit machines than ever now.
Oh and your graphics card, whilst not needing to be a monster, should still be a better made one (by a decent manufacturer) with the most RAM you can afford. 2GB of graphics ram means that you can have a high resolution image, with multiple monitors, without affecting the host machine RAM.
Best thing for a good Visual Studio setup? Money.
i7 or core 2, whichever. I'd go quad core if possible,and I'd use as much money as I could on ram.
The Quadcore AMD processors are also quite good now.
finally, considering 2010 is WPF based, a fast video card would also help, maybe not as much as more ram, but I'd go with something more than onboard video.
I'm running VS2008/VS2010 on a triple monitor setup with a really awful graphics card -- ATI Radeon HD3450. Graphics performance hasn't affected me one bit since I'm just doing simple WPF applications. Your needs will vary if you're doing game development or something more demanding.
I would spend your money on RAM, especially if you're using VMs. And not only do the VMs need memory to run well, they will also need to use the same disk. So either put them on a different hard disk, or go SSD. VS20xx thrashes the drive during compiling, and a fast disk will help you out a lot.
You can really get a great developer machine if you're willing to build it yourself.
Scott Hanselman says:
Jedis build their own lightsabers, so
you should build your own computer at
least once!
He describes how he built GOM (God's Own Machine) here for under $3K, and describes it in a podcast here.
If building your own is a bit beyond your aspirations, you can get some good ideas there about the most important features for a developer, from a Microsoft guru who really knows.
If you can afford it, go for a solid state drive.
I would consider getting a better-than-average video card because you'll need some horsepower to run multiple monitors, since you'll want to take advantage of the new tab tear-off ability in vs 2010 to display code files in separate windows.
I would definitely recommend a 10,000 RPM Velociraptor hard-drive or a pair of them striped because VS is a bit of a hog on IO resources.
If it was me, I'd go with a 6-core AMD Phenom processor and 6GB of Triple-channel RAM to maximize performance. If you're an Intel fan, go i7.
A good read on the importance of hard drive speed from ScottGu's Blog.
Tip/Trick: Hard Drive Speed and Visual Studio Performance
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.
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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.
At work, my PC is slow. I feel that I can be way more productive if I just wasn't waiting for Visual Studio and everything else to respond. My PC isn't bad (dual-core, 3GB of RAM), but there is a lot of corporate software and whatnot to slow everything down and sometimes lock it up.
Now, some developers have begun getting Windows 7 machines with 8 GB of RAM. Of course, I start salivating at this. However, I was told that I "had to justify" why I should get a new machine.
I can think of a lot of different things, but I am curious as to what every one else on SO would have to say.
NOTE: Ideally, these reasons should be specifically related to .NET development in Visual Studio on a Windows machine. This isn't a "how can I make my machine faster" question.
I would ask myself "What am I waiting on?" And then let the answer to that question drive whether or not I felt like I could justify it.
For example, right now, I'm dealing with 90 minute compiles of the project I'm working on. Would a faster machine help that? A little. But, more impactful would be sane configuration management. So, I'm pushing that way (to no avail) rather than to the hardware route.
Bring in a chess clock.
If you are waiting start the clock
when you aren't stop the clock.
At the end of day, total up the time
multiply it by your pay rate,
multiply it by 2000,
and that is a reasonable upper limit as
to the amount of money the company is squandering on you
per year due to a slow machine
Most useful metric: How much time do you spend reading The Onion (or, these days, StackOverflow)?
This is item #9 on The Joel Test:
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
Writing code in a compiled language is one of the last things that still can't be done instantly on a garden variety home computer. If your compilation process takes more than a few seconds, getting the latest and greatest computer is going to save you time. If compiling takes even 15 seconds, programmers will get bored while the compiler runs and switch over to reading The Onion, which will suck them in and kill hours of productivity.
I agree with the "what is holding me up?" approach.
I start with improviing workflow by looking at repetitive things I do that can be automated or a little helper tool can fix. Helper tools don't take long to write and add a lot of productivity. Purchasing tools is also a good return on your time - a lot of things you could write, you shouldn't bother, concentrate on your core activity and let the tool makers concentrate on theirs, whether is is help software, screen grabing, SEO tools, debugging tools, whatever.
If you can't improve things by changing your workflow (and I'd be surprised if you can't), then look at your hardware.
Increase memory if you can. If you're at 3GB with a 32 bit OS, no point going any further.
Add independent disks. One disk for the OS another for your build drive. That way there is less contention for disk access from the OS and the compiler. Makes a difference.
Better CPU. Only valid if you are doing the work to justify it.
Example: What do I use?
Dual Xeon Quad Core (8 cores, total)
8 GB RAM
Dual Monitors
VMWare virtual machines
What are the benefits?
Dual Monitor is great, much better than a single 1920x1200 screen.
Having lots of memory when using Virtual Machines is great because you can realistically give the VM a realistic amount of memory (2GB) without killing the host machine.
Having 8 cores means I can do a build and mess about in a VM doing a build or a debug at the same time, no problems.
I've had this machine for some time. Its old hat compared to an iCore7 machine, but its more than fast enough for any developer. Very rarely have I seen all the cores close to maxing out (pretty much going to be held back by I/O with that much CPU power - which is why I commented on multiple disks).
For me (working in a totally different environment, where JBoss, Eclipse and Firefox are the main resource sinks), it was simple enough:
"I have 2GBs of RAM available. I'm spending most of my time with 1GB of swap in use: imagine what task switching and application building looks like there. Another 2GB of RAM costs 50 euro. Ignoring the fact that it's frustrating working like this, you do the productivity math."
I could have shown CPU load figures and application build times as well, but it didn't come to that. It took them a month or two, but boy is development a joy since then! Oh, and for performance, it's likely you'd do best with Windows XP, but you probably already know that. ;]
Use some performance monitor to determine the cause.
For me its the antivirus has some kind of critical resource leak the slows down IO after a few days requiring a reboot and no hardware upgrades will help much.
The justification will need hard data to back it. If their business software is causing the problem that "this is industry standard" obviously doesn't fly anymore. Maybe they'll realize their business software sucks and fix that instead.
It stands to reason that Visual Studio (.NET compiling and the IDE) would run better on a $5000 server than a $500 desktop.
Does anyone have experience running Visual Studio in a virtual machine hosted on a server in this price range, with access via RDP? (Assume modern hardware available for the stated prices.)
Obviously, there will be other VMs on that server, but not everyone will be doing intensive tasks such as compiling at the same time, etc. As a starting point, you can assume 4GB of memory and 4 virtual CPUs are allocated to the VM, but feel free to offer other configuration suggestions.
Any insights? How did it work out? I am looking for practical ways to maximize the speed of the compile/run cycle and general IDE performance.
(I'm on the fence as to whether this belongs on Stack Overflow or Server Fault. Since it has to do with Visual Studio and might be of general interest to programmers trying to improve the development experience, I decided to post it here. Please move it if this is not okay.)
If you have a decent multicore processor on your desktop machine it's probably the disk that is a bottle neck. When compiling VS must access many files (in large solutions, multi project). So, I am assuming that CPU is not a problem.
What you can do:
reorganize your projects - if you use copy local then dlls are copied on multiple places (The VisualStudio Project Reference + Copy Local true option is evil!)
buy additional RAM and setup a RAM disk and do your compilation there (beware that if you restart your machine you'll loose RAM disk content - this can be mitigate (stable OS, version control sistem, ...) Speeding up build times dramatically or Speeding up the build – ditch the SSD and go for the RAM drive
buy an SSD disk to do compilation on
It should work out for you; it wouldn't be as good as running it locally on a better machine--but it sounds like it could still be an improvement.
The version of Visual Studio is another large factor, VS2008 has significant performance gains over VS2005.
C# development is also typically less resource-intensive than VB.NET development, since VB.NET runs a background compiler to provide near-real-time feedback about code errors.
And finally, make sure to disable any un-used plug-ins / addins that might be slowing you down.
For HP 2133 Mini:
1.2 Ghz CPU
1 GB RAM
Windows XP
5400 RPM HDD
I'm planning to install Visual Studio 2005 (assuming it's faster than 2008). I've seen https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8440/visual-studio-optimizations question so I'll take those into the account.
But do you think Visual Studio 2005 is going to work in an acceptable speed with this hardware?
Would be a bit sluggish when compiling, but otherwise should be OK. I'd suggest a bit more RAM though. It's cheap these days and upgrading from 1GB to 2GB will really have an effect, especially if you're also running other programs in the background.
Plus, then you might consider this.
That depends on the kinds of projects you intend to work on on the laptop. Visual Studio will certainly run just fine (2-4 GB of RAM would be better), but if you have large solutions you will see some performance degradation. Also, acceptable speed is in the eye of the beholder. It would probably drive me crazy, but others might be just fine with that machine.
Also, check out Scott's post here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx
HTH
Colby Africa
It depends on what you mean by acceptable. In my experience a 7200RPM hard drive will boost VS.NET 2005 performance speed as it is a very IO intensive application.
Scott Hanselman has a good post about using netbooks for Visual Studio development. His post specifically covers the Dell mini, but a lot of what he says applies to other netbooks as well.
That laptop is probably pushing the lower limit of "good enough". If you're writing a resource intensive app, it probably will be pretty slow when you're debugging. For a web site, you'll probably only slow down when the IDE is doing something intensive.
Its all about screen size. Anything less than 14/15 (inches) is not going to be usable.
I would go for at least 2gb of RAM and a descent screen size, I agree with StingyJack and wont go for anything less than 15"
The requirements of VS 2005 is one thing, but keep in mind that you will probely use servel other applications at the same time.
My laptop has a 17" screen, it works but at times i still miss the 22" wide screen I use at work.
add memory
as much as you can get.
Great answers, I'll add more RAM (as mentioned they are really cheap). I'm restricted with the monitor so it'll be 8.9 :)
The idea is I'll use this laptop do some presentation around, and If I need to debug or hack it on the way I should able to do it. There won't be any actual development other than, small hacks (hopefully!).
a 4:3 ratio screen will be much better then a 16:9, you will have much more vertical space