Why is my debug executable in Visual Studio (9) starting up so slowly?

Question

I am experiencing a very weird issue when using Visual Studio (9) for debugging my applications. Whenever I hit F5 to start the debugging, the application takes a long time until it even gets to the first line of my main function...

I started up Process Explorer and during this time you can see how slowly it finds and loads the required system dlls. It is a rather large project, so I do expect some delay on startup, but we have the same setup on a different machine, which works much faster. Do you have any idea what could cause these delays? Has anyone heard of some Visual Studio issue like this?

I wouldn't have put it on here, but I also have an issue with my breakpoints most of the time. They simply do not seem to be hit at all by Visual Studio, even though the code does execute and the application seems to be doing what I asked it to do. (This is all happening in one thread on one process, so that shouldn't be the issue)

Please let me know, if you have any idea what could cause this behavior and if re-installing Visual Studio would be recommended?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

IMHO, the most likely cause here is that the debugger is trying to load symbols from a network share and the latency of the network is slowing down start up time. Try removing all symbol servers from the debug menu and retrying the scenario.

• Tools -> Options
• Debugging -> Symbols

Answer 2

The way to fix this is to delete ALL breakpoints. I found this post here, which I must have overlooked initially: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/589338/slow-debugging-issue-in-visual-studio

It explains that you actually have to hit the button "Delete all breakpoints" rather than deleting them by hand. After re-starting VS the debug mode starts with reasonable delay now.