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How do I disable Perfwatson in Visual Studio? Perfwatson is not disabled by Tools > Extensions and Updates > Developer Analytics Tools.

RickAndMSFT
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2 Answers2

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For Visual Studio 2022 and the latest version of Visual Studio 2019:

  1. From the help menu, select Privacy > Privacy Settings
  2. In the Visual Studio Experience Improvement Program dialog, select No, I would not like to participate.

Note: You can't opt out in pre-release versions by this mechanism.

For older versions of Visual Studio

  1. From the help menu, select Send Feedback > Settings.
  2. In the Visual Studio Experience Improvement Program dialog, select No, I would not like to participate.

See Visual Studio Customer Experience Improvement Program for the official Microsoft instructions.

This change writes to the registry. See then next answer for fixing directly in the registry.

RickAndMSFT
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    Thanks. I disabled this because it took so long to wait for this process to stop when installing extensions. If Microsoft want more people to participate then they should make sure that this process does not take so long to exit. – David S. May 31 '17 at 11:22
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    Ironically, the users with the slowest experience, who are the one Microsoft most needs data from, are the ones most likely to disable the feedback channel. – Edward Brey Jun 26 '17 at 16:54
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    @EdwardBrey - there is a tale of a developer who improved game's FPS by optimising the FPS counter. – Alex Jul 16 '17 at 14:48
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    I noticed that whenever I make some dummy VS solution just to test out some code, and then I close down Visual Studio and try to delete the solution folder, Windows complains that the files are in use. I have to wait about 30 seconds before I am able to delete the folder. When I check running processes I can see that `devenv.exe` is terminated on exit. But not this child process called `PerfWatson2.exe`. Now that I have disabled this option, it no longer starts with Visual Studio, and when I exit out of Visual Studio I can easily delete the folder. So thank you for sharing this tip! – Samir Oct 06 '17 at 08:48
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    Whoot! Disabling this speeds up VS2017 with 10 seconds! – Michel Oct 11 '17 at 15:40
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    Wow, this had a huge affect on how fast VS2017 loaded. Maybe it's a conflict with antivirus or something but measuring performance greatly reduced performance for me. – N Jones Oct 13 '17 at 00:16
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    This smashes my hard drive and CPU. Makes VS lag a lot. – rollsch Feb 07 '18 at 23:42
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    "Participatino will not degrade the performance of your software". Yeah, right... – Carra Feb 14 '18 at 08:36
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    Note that you have to have a Project open for the "Send Feedback" item to be in the Help menu, at least in Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017, Version 15.5.6 – Clare Macrae Feb 28 '18 at 20:21
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    and for good measure, delete C:\Windows\Installer\$PatchCache$\Managed\E31ADFC6843AB51328A006B3CBDB6748\14.0.23107\PerfWatson2.exe along with all the log files littered in multiple places under C:\Users\%USERID%\Local Settings – smirkingman Mar 01 '18 at 09:51
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    Thx. I suspected that it was writing hundreds of MB's to my temp folder making Visual Studio unresponsive. – gast128 Mar 23 '18 at 11:23
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    This program absolutely smashes my disk doing 200mb/s reads at times lagging everything out, – rollsch Sep 19 '18 at 07:35
  • I tried here but the "OK" just don't do anything. Guess I need to be logged as admin, but I don't have it's access. :( – Iúri dos Anjos Sep 27 '18 at 14:46
  • And I thought VS was crap compared to Xamarin, silly me. – Nick Turner Jan 17 '19 at 14:30
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    Interesting enough, I would have issues opening projects when VS starts, ending in VS crashing. I disabled this add-on (via the answer) and guess what? VS opens/loads projects immediately – Rob Scott Jan 31 '19 at 22:59
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    visual studio 2019, still the same issue... ironically its making visual studio freeze for me every time because it takes 100% disk usage. had to disable it to be able to work..i actually cant believe the amount of performance i got out of disabling it! – Niklas Oct 02 '19 at 10:11
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    *Send Feedback > Settings* That should really be under *Tools > Options > Feedback*. – tsilb Feb 18 '20 at 20:23
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    For me, this option was under Visual Studio 2019's 'Help > Privacy > Privacy Settings' menu. – quaabaam Oct 01 '21 at 22:53
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You can do it via the registry. For a 64 bit OS, the key is at 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM

And for a 32 bit OS, at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM

For Group Policy management (settings from IT department), it's

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\VisualStudio\SQM

The key name is OptIn (a DWORD), and you need to set it to 0 to disable.

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/visual-studio-experience-improvement-program

To set it automatically

(On a 64 bit OS machine not managed by a group policy), fire up an admin command prompt and just

REG ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM  /v OptIn /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

You may have to close and restart all visual studio related processes (or reboot) for the change to bite.

Johan Lundberg
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