Can I improve Visual Studio performance through virtualization?

Question

It stands to reason that Visual Studio (.NET compiling and the IDE) would run better on a $5000 server than a $500 desktop.

Does anyone have experience running Visual Studio in a virtual machine hosted on a server in this price range, with access via RDP? (Assume modern hardware available for the stated prices.)

Obviously, there will be other VMs on that server, but not everyone will be doing intensive tasks such as compiling at the same time, etc. As a starting point, you can assume 4GB of memory and 4 virtual CPUs are allocated to the VM, but feel free to offer other configuration suggestions.

Any insights? How did it work out? I am looking for practical ways to maximize the speed of the compile/run cycle and general IDE performance.

(I'm on the fence as to whether this belongs on Stack Overflow or Server Fault. Since it has to do with Visual Studio and might be of general interest to programmers trying to improve the development experience, I decided to post it here. Please move it if this is not okay.)

Answer 1

It should work out for you; it wouldn't be as good as running it locally on a better machine--but it sounds like it could still be an improvement.

The version of Visual Studio is another large factor, VS2008 has significant performance gains over VS2005.

C# development is also typically less resource-intensive than VB.NET development, since VB.NET runs a background compiler to provide near-real-time feedback about code errors.

And finally, make sure to disable any un-used plug-ins / addins that might be slowing you down.

Answer 2

It is my understanding that compiling with multiple cores/cpus is something you can only do with visual c++ (not C# and not VB). Based on my experience, it isn't the compiling that takes the most amount of time, it is the rendering of designers when switching to design view.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb385193.aspx

Our company uses virtuals for development environments as we've found that saves a lot of time when someone accidentally screws up their dev environment. But we also find that it runs a lot slower than when VS is on the host operating system as there is a tremendous amount of disk IO.

My suggestion would be to get better desktop machines as I've found to be the biggest bang for your buck. I'm lobbying for a quad-core dell t300 with 24gb of ram. That runs under $2k with a whole bunch of hard drives (look under small-med business and "deals").

Answer 3

Have you seen this SO post: Visual Studio Optimizations

Also: Very slow compile times on Visual Studio

Answer 4

If you have a decent multicore processor on your desktop machine it's probably the disk that is a bottle neck. When compiling VS must access many files (in large solutions, multi project). So, I am assuming that CPU is not a problem. What you can do:

• reorganize your projects - if you use copy local then dlls are copied on multiple places (The VisualStudio Project Reference + Copy Local true option is evil!)
• buy additional RAM and setup a RAM disk and do your compilation there (beware that if you restart your machine you'll loose RAM disk content - this can be mitigate (stable OS, version control sistem, ...) Speeding up build times dramatically or Speeding up the build – ditch the SSD and go for the RAM drive
• buy an SSD disk to do compilation on