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I'm experiencing a very severe performance issue with VS2015. We have recently moved to VS2015 from VS2013 for our project. I am finding that very often (not 100% consistent) I am getting 50-90% CPU usage on idle when our ASP.NET MVC project is open.

Here's a typical CPU usage scenario:

VS2013

  • App launch with opening of our project - CPU usage ~50-90%
  • After around 10-15 seconds - CPU usage ~0-5% and stays there
  • App close - CPU usage decreases and goes to 0 as app is closed

VS2015

  • App launch with opening of our project - CPU usage ~50-90%
  • After around 10-15 seconds - CPU usage ~50-90% and stays there
  • App close - CPU usage stays at ~50-90% mark and often just hands there. Closing the app is sometimes unsuccessful, with VS2015 giving an "Error Encountered" on close, forcing us to use Task Manager to kill the process.

We are using Pro for both 2013 and 2015. Extensions used are StyleCop, ReSharper 9.2 and Productivity Power Tools (for Column guides only). The extensions are the same for both 2013 and 2015. We have tried uninstalling/disabling the extensions with no performance improvement. The issue is present for a couple of our developers, but not all...

System Config * MacBook Pro with Windows 10 running in Bootcamp

Fixes attempted

  • Disable Git source control provider - no performance change
  • Disable ReSharper/StyleCop - slight performance improvement, but idle CPU usage issue remains
  • Update VS2015 to Update 1 - no performance improvement
  • Upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 (unrelated to the actual performance issue) - no performance improvement
  • Re-install of VS2015 - no performance improvement
  • Disable antivirus (in case it somehow was getting upset with the configuration) - no performance improvement
  • Unload some of the solution projects - inconsistent performance improvement. It looks like when the non-UI projects are loaded, the performance issue is not present. Once we load 1 of the 2 UI projects, the issue has a 50/50 chance of occurring. Once both projects are loaded, the issue has about 90% chance of occurring. So this is pointing to the UI projects being the culprits, but there is nothing special about those projects - a bunch of controllers and views with some UI util classes along with .css and .js libraries. This change in performance is only present in VS2015 - VS2013 is perfectly happy with all projects. Another point going against the UI projects being to blame is that another WinForms solution which is small in size is having the exact same performance issue in VS2015, while a larger ASP.NET solution is perfectly fine :(

We are trying to move to C# 6.0 and as VS2013 is not supporting that, this is causing us quite a bit of grief..

Any thoughts or advice? Thanks!

Web Dev
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  • go back to VS2013.......? – Mitch Wheat Jan 13 '16 at 01:28
  • VS2015 is the way to go for new features and C# 6.0 which we would like to take advantage of (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27093908/how-to-enable-c-sharp-6-0-feature-in-visual-studio-2013). That was the initial decision, but surely there must be a way around this – Web Dev Jan 13 '16 at 01:34
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    Have you tried the /SafeMode switch when starting Visual Studio (devenv.exe)? It isn't a fix, obviously, but it should help diagnosing the problem. – Bradley Uffner Jan 13 '16 at 02:27
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    Try disabling the VS extensions and see how it behaves. – Shyju Jan 13 '16 at 02:51
  • Default language version of VS 2015 is C# 6.0, it may not compatible with your projects. Could you try again using C# 5.0 or older (Project Properties > Build > Advanced > Language Version) It may fix the issue. – tdat00 Jan 13 '16 at 03:15
  • As I understand from your question, your issues are with debugging with VS2015 vs VS2013, and not running (with no debugger attached) a release build, built with VS2015. In that case, I'd suggest you disable diagnostic tools and intellitrace, which are ON by default, and can take a heavy impact in the performance of your debugging experience. More info here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31904929/how-to-disable-diagnostic-tools – Fede Jan 13 '16 at 04:19
  • analyze the CPU usage with WPR/WPA. Install the WPT (Part of Win10 SDK: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/downloads/windows-10-sdk), run WPRUI.exe, select CPU and under Scenario ".Net activity" and press start. Log the cpu usage for 1 minute and save it into an ETL file. Open this file in WPA.exe and analyze it: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-42-WPT-CPU-Analysis – magicandre1981 Jan 13 '16 at 04:54
  • Thanks for all of your suggestions guys! I'll try those out when I get back to the office and update here in case the solution is resolved. What makes it tricky is that the last time I used vs2015 the performance issue went away... but I'm sure it'll be back again. It makes no sense why it comes and goes - nothing really changes for such a dramatic difference – Web Dev Jan 14 '16 at 23:40
  • Safe mode seems to do the trick every time. Thanks for the suggestion (and the other suggestions as well!). Maybe it is an extension afterall? Strange as I have actually re-installed VS2015 and removed all the extensions as well and the issue still seemed to be present. I might try uninstalling the extensions one by one and see if that helps once again. – Web Dev Jan 18 '16 at 00:10
  • have you captured the traces? – magicandre1981 Jan 22 '16 at 05:31

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