Visual Studio 2008 very slow

Question

I am using Visual Studio 2008 on a Windows 7 virtual machine for building a ASP MVC app. I have noticed recently that it has become painfully slow, some pages take upwards of 60 seconds to display. If I deploy these pages to a devserver to test they are very quick, almost instant. Also, if I manually step through the code to display the page it is much quicker than if I let it just run. I am debugging with the WebDev.DevServer and notice it sits up around 90% CPU when displaying.

Any ideas on what this might be?

Answer 1

Antivirus software and Visual Studio don't tend to play well together. Could be that.

How long has VS been running? It could also be a general bug/memory leak in the program.

Answer 2

Is it compiling the project every time you load the page?

Answer 3

VS2008 is a pig. I had a similar problem and an extra 1GB of RAM did wonders. Put as much RAM in your machine as your OS can use.

Also it helps to disable or restrict what your virus scanner is checking on access.

Answer 4

Have you installed the Visual Studio Service Pack 1? I had some nasty performance issues, especially after adding ReSharper (which is great, btw), and SP1 fixed them nicely. I'll second JohnFx's comments about having plenty of RAM too.