How do I speed up visual studio with a large number of projects?

Question

Visual Studio 2005 is very slow with a solution with 21 projects. Any ideas how to speed it up?

Answer 1

a) Buy more memory b) Break up into different solutions c) Upgrade to VS 2008 d) http://geekswithblogs.net/Ahmed_Hussein_blog/archive/2007/11/12/116791.aspx

Answer 2

I don't have VS open in front of me right now...but its roughly this...

Go to..

Tools > options > Build and release options.

Select - build startup project and dependencies only.

This will significantly speed up the process.

Answer 3

Here's some good tips on improving VS compile speed:

• Disable StyleCop, FxCop or any other code analysis tools
• Create multiple build configurations, one for each of the tasks you perform and only compile what you need in each particular configuration
• Remove unneeded MSBuild tasks

Answer 4

I did some performance testing on build speed (VS2008 though).

I tried using RAM Drive. Almost no difference from RAID 1+0.

Quad core doesn't seem to help much as CPU is never at 100% (well, one of them is at 100% I guess). CPU frequency seems to help though. Not sure about memory speed.

So, to speed it up, consolidate some projects (since having same amount of .cs files builds slower if they are in separate projects) or create sub-solutions - solutions that only hold dependancies for your current work project. So, say you have Web app and admin app and some sort of WPF UI client, create 3 solutions, one with web app, one with admin and one for client.

Answer 5

There are a whole bunch of suggestions in these questions: Visual Studio Optimizations & Very slow compile times on Visual Studio. A combination of a few of these will definitely help to some degree

Answer 6

ScottGu has said hard drive speed is one of the most important factors in VS performance. When we got new computers at work recently I requested that they have a second top-of-the-line hard drive. My Development folder is on my D: drive and VS loads and compiles 20+ project solutions in a matter of seconds.

Answer 7

Upgrading to 2008 is worth it for your situation. At my last job, we had 50 projects, and VS 2005 was dog slow. Plus it was a pain to debug (w/ multithreading). The IDE kept blowing up on us. As soon as we upgraded to VS 2008, everything went faster, the compiles went faster (partially because MS implemented a smart parallelization algorithm by the looks of it), it uses less RAM, and is far more stable.

The only regret we had with 2008 is in the C++ end of things (most of our app was VB.Net, some C#, and some C++). The new version of C++ doesn't support Windows NT which we needed to do. The workaround is a postevent that uses an old Edit Bin and sets the version for 4.0.

Answer 8

If you are working on Mobile projects then this might be the solution

Answer 9

Hotfix 947315 for Visual Studio 2005.

This is a cumulative fix for the following:

• KB947315: The Visual Studio 2005 IDE stops responding when you work with Visual C++ projects
• KB943969: Visual Studio 2005 stops responding or performance is slow when you use the IntelliSense feature
• KB916769: The Visual Studio 2005 IDE stops responding when you work with a large Visual C++ .NET solution in Visual Studio 2005