How to speed up Visual Studio 2008? Add more resources?

Question

Hello, I'm using Visual Studio 2008 (with the latest service pack) I also have ReSharper 4.5 installed. ReSharper Code analysis/ scan is turned off. OS: Windows 7 Enterprise Edition

It takes me a long time (2 minutes) to run the debugger, compiler, and if I save a file in my app_code folder it locks up for 2 minutes.

I have 12 Gb of ram and as you can see I have plenty more. This screen shot was taken when VS was frozen/locked up.

Can I allocate more ram to VS? Or is there any other tweaks I can do?

Answer 1

Looks like either a slow hard disk or a slow network to me. Any of the relevant files stored on the network?

Answer 2

Try removing ReSharper and see what happens. Is there an active virusscanner? What happens when you disable it for a moment?

Oh, and can you move your classes from app_code to an external library? I am not sure, but I think a change in app_code can result into a complete recompile.

Answer 3

Probably hard drive speed. This blog post from scottgu is a little old but it is still relevant: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx

Answer 4

See these links. i may be helpful

http://dotnettipoftheday.org/tips/speedup%5Fvisual%5Fstudio.aspx

http://dotnettipoftheday.org/tips/optimize%5Flaunch%5Fof%5Fvs2005.aspx

and u can find same info from here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/501736/speed-up-visual-studio-tips

Answer 5

This may not address everything, but memory constraint issues are pretty common with ReSharper. Yet, I am addicted to it, and the speed improvements of removing it didn't outweigh the withdrawl pain...

By default, Visual Studio will only address 2GB of memory. However, you can make it large memory aware (so it will use up to 3GB) by following these steps (from this Steven Harman post):

1. Be sure to backup devenv.exe
2. Using the Visual Studio command prompt, navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\
3. execute the following command: editbin /LARGEADDRESSAWARE devenv.exe

Also, see this post, which has some other great tips for overall Visual Studio performance. Every little bit helps.

Try that, and get yourself a faster (10,000 RPM) hard drive. Plenty of posts (here on SO, on Coding Horror, and elsewhere) attest to the performance gains of moving from a standard 5,400 RPM to a faster model.

Answer 6

Try running Process Monitor and use Tools/Process Activity Summary to show if any of the processes on your system are causing a large amount of file accesses, registry accesses or network activity. If you filter the log for the name of the file you're trying to save to then it may also show some API errors or permissions problems that are causing the slowdown.

Answer 7

A faster hard drive maybe your solution. Jeff Atwood has a blog entry about using a 10,000 rpm hard drive in a computer.

Another question here on Stackoverflow talks about Visual Studio slow downs due to virus scanners running.

I myself have run into large solutions taking a long time, CodeRush Express causing thing to run slow, background processes running that cause slow downs.

Good luck in your hunt. It would be interesting to know what you find.

Answer 8

Have you made sure that you're using the latest version of ReSharper (4.5.2)? There were a fwe good performance gains made in the last update. Myself, I've got a 28-project web solution with 1,400 source files, a 5400 RPM drive (yeah, I know), and my startup time for debugging the project is less that 30 seconds.