Visual Studio 2010 Intellisense slows down everything

Question

Hey.

I have the issue with Visual Studio 2010, after a while, running exceptionally slowly and slowing everything else down with it. I'm meaning:

• Most other open windows become unresponsive
• Typing is delayed
• Build times increase 10-fold
• Saving takes forever

I am sure this is an Intellisense issue; disabling it solves everything, and when this happens in Task Manager I find a couple of vcpkgsrv.exe (the Intellisense thing) running at about 160,000K memory (This is about the same as an older, less graphical intensive games). However, I would like to run Intellisense. The only way I have of solving this at the moment is to abort these processes when they slow stuff down.

I have tried getting the patch and think it is installed, because I cannot install it again.

EDIT: I'm running Windows XP, with VSC++ Express. I have 2GB RAM, and a dual core 3.2GHz Processor. Anyone help please?

Answer 1

This is not a common complaint, which makes it likely it is environmental. Some random shots in the dark:

• Not having at least 2 GB of RAM
• Installing VS2010 on an old machine with a badly fragmented disk drive
• Editing extremely large source code files (> 10,000 lines)
• Keeping a very large number of editor tabs opened (> 50)
• A bad interaction with a Visual Studio add-on
• A bad interaction with a system add-on

The IntelliSense engine for C++ has lots of tweakable items in Tools + Options, Text Editor, C/C++, Advanced. This blog post describes these options in detail. If your machine is old and not well maintained (i.e. never ran a disk defrag, lots of shell extension handlers) then consider a new one or a system wipe.

Answer 2

I had the same problem with my Windows XP machine. After a long search I found a solution so I'll post it back here since it was the first result I got on google.

Install Windows Automation API update for Windows XP (KB971513).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=cd55456d-9703-42a0-b982-8a8a89ca0aa3&displaylang=en

Answer 3

It might indicate an issue with the solution's sdf file. Try to close the solution, delete sdf file and load the solution again.