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.
Related
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.
Visual Studio 2008 hangs a lot on my machine. I work in an team environment using Team Foundation Server and when the server has issues VS hangs forever, sometimes if I have two instances open one of them will hang even if TFS is working. I try to disconnect from TFS and work offline but even that hangs my VS. Is there any way to make VS more responsive in case TFS is down?
I have a quad core i5 CPU, 8gb ram, and am running locally (not in a VM).
This might help you set VS to work offline and should help with the server timeouts. Also kick the sys admin of your TFS server, it shouldn't be that unreliable.
Sometimes this is caused simply because the TFS dialogs appear off-screen and it appears to hang. If pressing Esc "unfreezes" Visual Studio, then this is likely the problem.
I found the solution at: http://www.imiscommunity.com/visual_studio_2008_hangs_tfs_compare_dialog_not_visible
TFS can be a serious nuisance when developing a solution that is used by many team members. Without knowing more specifics about your setup, I would ask a few more questions:
What is your machine spec?
Are all other developer machines the same spec? Do they experience the same kind of issues?
Have you tried watching the CPU and Memory usage in Windows Task Manager to determine the amount of resources being used?
In summary, I have found that this can often be down to a number of reasons. As a contract developer, I have to use many different systems from the latest desktop with 12GB of RAM and an i7 processor, through to Virtual Machines on a server (my preferred choice because it is scalable and easier to snapshot), down to using older machines that are insufficient for the task (one of the distasteful parts of the jobs is having to request an upgraded machine).
I suggest reinstalling you development environment from scratch, including operating system and everything. Make sure the hardware is the best you can get, and install on a virtual machine instance on that development machine. That way you can take incremental (albeit slightly large at a fair few GB) backups that will prove handy should you come across an issue.
BTW the most common problem I had was with Visual Studio plug-ins on a system that lacked sufficient RAM. ReSharper was my biggest offender as it compiles regularly in the background in order to highlight bugs - but personally I would not code without it now.
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
is there any major performance changes in 2010.
There were a lot of complaints about perf during the beta cycle. They even delayed the RTM release date by a few weeks to buy extra time to work on it. It sure looked like cloudy with a chance of meat balls to me, but I've got the Ultimate edition running on two machines that also have VS2008 and they both are very responsive. Many of the awkward delays in VS2008 are gone. It is all around snappy. Only starting the debugger seems a bit slower.
They did a great job, it is a fine product. You won't be disappointed. Defrag your hard drive before you install it.