Which features and services in Vista can you remove with nLite (or tool of choice) to make a Virtual PC-image of Vista as small as possible?
The VPC must work with development in Visual Studio.
A normal install of Vista today is like 12-14 GB, which is silly when I got it to work with Visual Studio at 4 GB. But with Visual Studio it totals around 8 GB which is a bit heavy to move around in multiple copies.
You can try and cut stuff out with vLite, but unless you cut out a real lot it's not going to save a ton of drive space. Here's your best bets:
Disable Hibernate and run disk cleanup to remove any hibernation file.
Disable System restore entirely and use disk cleanup to remove all restore points... this will save an enormous amount of space.
Disable SuperFetch (since it kills your VM hard drive with it's crazy usage)
Minimize the size of your pagefile by setting a smaller static size and make sure to assign lots of memory to your VM to compensate.
Use the disk utilities to shrink your VM drive down as far as possible.
Once you have the base machine configured, I would suggest using VMware workstation and the awesome Linked Clones feature, which will let you create a completely new VM based on the base machine, but only using a portion of the space.
I would not advise running a Vista VM from a USB flash drive, it will be slower than dirt.
Related
I am trying to install Linux in a computer that has Windows 7. The first step was shrinking the disk size but Windows did not allow any reduction. Thus I followed a number of steps to disable "unmovable" files
I disabled the Page File
I disabled hibernation
I disabled System Protection
After that nothing seemed to have changed so I checked the disk fragmentation and it was 11% fragmented. I have since then run at least 4 defrags and I have also defragged the free space using Defraggler.
As of now the disk looks like this
Right now, Windows refuses to shrink the partition by any amount (I imagine that the files at the end of the disk are the troublesome ones).
Coming from an Linux background I am unsure what else needs to be done in order to shrink the partition.
Are you using Windows disk management tool to do the shrink? Here's a link for that method.
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/
Also make sure the recycle bin on that drive is empty.
I finally figured it out.
The easiest way is just to use a Live USB with GParted on it since that will allow you to move Windows protected files around (the windows OS is not loaded on the live distro).
If just defragmenting is concerned one can use Hiren's Boot CD and the included Defraggler for the same purpose.
I had the same problem on Windows 10. Turns out it was antivirus software that was running on the machine that prevented defragmentation happen properly. I actually had to temporarily uninstall antivirus. After that, the Disk Management tool was able to correctly shrink the volume.
I have VS 2013 and Microsoft Windows 8.1
The issue appeared at the ending of last week. Without any updating or important changing, when I do somethings in VS, disk usage reaches 100%. For example, when I click on "Check In" button in the "Team Explorer" window, disk usage raises up to 100%. Sometimes by a simple right-click in text editor this problems happens.
I googled about 100% disk usage problem but there are some things about this problem on windows 8.1 but on my computer, all applications are running without any problem, just VS2013 has a "full disk usage" problem.
Some information about my system:
OS Name: Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro
OS Version: 6.3.9600 N/A Build 9600
System Type: x64-based PC
Processor(s): 1 Processor(s) Installed.
Intel64 Family 6 Model 60 Stepping 3GenuineIntel ~3500 Mhz
Total Physical Memory: 8,131 MB
Available Physical Memory: 3,836 MB
Virtual Memory: Max Size: 10,947 MB
Virtual Memory: Available: 5,275 MB
Virtual Memory: In Use: 5,672 MB
Page File Location(s): C:\pagefile.sys
(Comment for others landing here as #Marta explains that the problem no longer persists on their machine.)
In general, any performance issue in Visual Studio should be reported to Microsoft. It's easy to do this directly from VS using the Report a Problem tool. That feature will automatically attach logs/traces which are shared privately with Microsoft. Internally, tooling will analyse those attachments to assign a ticket to the relevant team. With such attachments, there is a high likelihood that the problem can be diagnosed and fixed in a future release of Visual Studio.
Instructions on the Report a Problem tool:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-report-a-problem-with-visual-studio?view=vs-2019
If you prefer to diagnose high disk IO yourself, FileMon can be a useful tool:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/filemon
I am using Visual Code 1.71.2 as well as Visual Studio 2022 (Community Edition) on Windows 10. I am also facing the same issue.
After lot of checking, found disabling superfetch mitigates this issue. But again, Windows, applications startup take lot of time.
As a workaround, I found that by clearing %temp% folder after using visual studio or code eliminates this issue and disk activity is normal.
But every time, I may not remember this cleanup and hate it for forgetting :(
Hope this helps someone in similar situation.
It could be related to Visual Studio updates - which would show under C:\ProgramData\Package Cache.
A disk space management tool like TreeSize Pro will help figure it out though ... it will show which directory is using the most space. You can then target what aspect of Visual Studio is eating up your drive space.
There is a free trial at https://www.jam-software.com/treesize/
You can also use this tool to export and post a screenshot / export of the usage here and it may help identify what is going on.
I had a similar issue that turned out to be the built-in git provider having issues with large codebases containing a moderate-to-large amount of changes before a commit.
Changing to a third-party one fixed the issue.
The operating system manages the resources (CPU cores, disk drives, GPU) to deliver what you have asked of it.
Ideally (what the OS designers are hoping for), when you perform an action, all the resources spin up into action and due to a well balanced system, they all go to 100% utilization, for a brief length of time, then go back to idle.
This form of utilization is, in practice impossible to achieve, as the PC builders would have to know what your system is going to be used for.
When the task manager describes the CPU as 100% utilized, it means that all the cores on the box, are busy running code, and are the bottleneck.
When the task manager describes the disk as 100% utilized, it (as far as I can tell), means that there is always a queue of items to be read, or written to/from the disk. Even with 100% utilization, it may be that the metric is the only reason you are concerned, and the system is otherwise responsive.
In either of these cases, it shows that for a given workload, the CPU or the disk drive has become the rate determining step.
In practice, it should not matter, unless the length of time the system is at 100% is longer than a few minutes, or that your machine feels otherwise sluggish.
Further diagnosis can be performed by using the tool Sys internals : procmon, or the Microsoft : ADK
I would look using the procmon, at what files are being accessed during the 100%disk usage period, and decide whether
The behavior is sensible (if not raise a bug with Microsoft)
The machine is working usably (if not consider a hybrid or ssd disk)
I've had some exasperating problems with disk usage and source control explorer.
What fixed the issue for me was making sure that I never opened Source Control Explorer in more than one project at a time, keep it closed when I could and limit the amount of VS instances you have open.
An SSD may can solve this... Are you sure this is caused by visual studio? when I was using Windows 8.1, the Windows Defender get to 100% disk usage from time to time. If you're sure it occurs when you use Visual Studio, you can try to repair it using the installer. Hope these would help you.
Try moving the source code to SSD drive.
HDDs have much slower disk I/O performance compared to SSD drives.
Generally in windows C drive comes as SSD drive.
In an application I'm working on, under certain conditions the memory usage will shoot through the roof, effectively locking up my computer. I don't think it's a memory leak, and there are no errors, it just needs too much memory. The memory usage jumps to 99% in Task Manager and Windows stops working, forcing me to reboot.
Is it possible to set a maximum amount of memory VS can use while debugging? I'm not looking for a way to make it run out of memory faster, I just want to keep some memory free so Windows can keep working.
Visual Studio 2010
Windows 7 64b
8GB RAM
C# .NET
Edit:
I'm not asking how to fix a memory leak. I'm trying to limit the memory used by the VS debugger. For example, my PC has 8GB RAM, but my application has to run on a PC with 2GB RAM. So I want to configure VS to only use 2GB. If the application tries to allocate 2.0001GB I want VS to tell it there is no more memory (probably causing a crash).
This isn't exactly the answer you were looking for, but it might help others, so I'm posting:
I would try the following:
1) Download Oracle Virtualbox
2) Download Disk2VHD.exefrom Microsoft Sysinternals
3) Clone your system using Disk2VHD
4) Configure a VM with the memory restrictions you want.
In this way you can restrict the RAM and CPUs used by your task, and possibly recover easier from the case you describe.
Hi we have a server with 32 cores and 256GB RAM, we are using this with SQL Server 2008 Enterprise on Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise.
Currently windows has allocated automatically a swapfile of 256GB which seems excessive. Is it advisable to hard limit the swapfile to something smaller like 32GB to force it to use the physical RAM?
Is it the swap file or is it the hibernate file?
The answer depends upon the work the machine is expected to do. You might find that Windows doesn't touch the swap file much because you have adequate physical memory available. One approach would be to cut the swap file allocation in half, then use the inbuilt performance monitoring tools to make sure it is still running ok, then after a period of stable running look to half the swap allocation again.
But is it really a problem? With a machine like that you probably have a good chunk of hard drive space available, and i doubt that they would be slow old 5400rpm drives :)
An ideally setup OLTP SQL Server should never need to use the swap file. It depends what you are using this server for.
But unless you are short of disk space, I wouldn't worry too much. 32GB sounds a better size though.
I have the following setup for my daily/main/only development environment
Hardware/Tin = 4gb ram, 2.6ghz dual core CPU, 2x250gb HD's, usual array of periperhals
One the tin above, I currently have Windows XP installed, in Windows XP I have VMWare Workstation installed and I run a Windows Server 2003 deelopment environment. This includes,Visual Studio 2003/2005/2008, Sql Sever 2005/2008, Full MS Office suite, some producitivity tools (e.g. Redgate Sql/Data Compare, DevXpress Coderush, TestDriven.net etc).
I have problems with this, it runs slow (15 minutes to boot), the Watch/Autos windows in VS freeze up when debugging, I can't have more than 2-3 copies of VS open, the Errors window freezes up, WinGrep and COm+ constantly runs out of Virtual Desktop Memory and so forth (In fact, I would attribue most of the issues to Virtual Desktop Memory)
Now, I've tried every tweak in the book, I have second HD for VMWare, my paging file is on a differnt drive, I've adjusted my Ram split between guest and host, I've hacked the reg key for Virtual Desktop Memory and all of this to no avail.
Now, I could increase my Ram or CPU, but I'm not able to.
My question is, has anybody experienced the above, and if so, how did you solve it? Did you try ESXi? or shift your environment to raw tin?
IMHO, you've tried just about every tweak in the book. I'd suggest that you should just move to native for your main setup, and restrict VM use for testing.
I use a VM as my main dev env, but I don't run as much stuff as you, so I don't hit a big performance wall.
I guess the trick you didn't try was to run less things on your VM. 2-3 copies of VS are a recipe for slowness. Running Sql Server, same thing. Bump up memory would be good, but at least run services (iis, sql server) on another vm or better yet, another box. You are taxing your VM waay too much, it is not VM's fault.
The problem you run into most of the time on VPS is IO wait.
Do you run your virtual machine off of a disk image, if so try defragmenting your drive.
Or did you dedicate a partition to it?
Edit:
I would suggest to:
either try defragmenting the drive that has the disk image
either try dedicating a partition to the virtual machine, instead of using a disk image all together. (ideally the first partition on the drive, since this will have the lowest random access time)
Running off a disk image works, but since you're working on top of a filesystem, the disk image might be fragmented throughout the disk.
Good luck, hope it helps...