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I've searched for this topic but can't seem to find posts that relate exactly to what I am experiencing.

I have a Visual Studio solution that I need to work on, its fairly large and contains 16 projects.

Everything is just so so slow and choppy (Except start-up which is actually quite fast).

Clicking a line in the text editor, it takes about 5 seconds just to move the cursor.

Switching between files ~1-2 mines (if I'm lucky)

Clicking on 'Tools' ~ 2 minutes for the drop down menu to appear.

If I right click one of the projects then its ~5-10 minutes before I get the drop down menu. During this time my entire PC locks up.

Closing Visual Studio (in rage) ~10-20mins

As for debugging and building.. well I've never managed to get that far.

Looking in task manager (opening this with visual studio going takes a long time) there is nothing running that is consuming a lot of memory/cpu.

I know Microsoft products are not renowned for being fast but this is ridiculous, there is no way I can code anything like this. Something must be wrong.

Any help would be so greatly appreciated, my head is ready to explode.

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate SP1

Windows 7 x64

Intel i7 950 @ 3.07GHz

6GB RAM (Tri Channel)

2x nVidia GTX 470 (SLI)

  • any extensions installed ? do you work in a tfs environnement ? are the files (sln, projects, source) opened are local or network files ? Did you try without the VS SP1 installed ? – Matthieu Mar 28 '11 at 18:32
  • I get the same thing when opening PHP files of all things. It turned out to be a buggy vs.php plugin. Check your plugins! – Byron Whitlock Mar 28 '11 at 18:35
  • you probably have so just to be sure: have you enabled "Show processes from all users" in the task manager? – Milan Mar 28 '11 at 18:36
  • Your PC isn't enough, but mine is =P – BlackBear Mar 28 '11 at 20:35
  • I have no installed extensions, the files are local, show processes from all users is enabled (not seeing anything taking much resources) and my PC is pretty high spec. With/without SP1 is no different. –  Mar 29 '11 at 01:25
  • When you say "there is nothing running that is consuming a lot of memory/cpu", does this also imply that the CPU usage is low, or is the CPU usage high, but taskman doesn't show you what is consuming so much CPU? (I know this sounds ridiculous, but I actually had this a while ago, which is why I ask.) – sbi Mar 29 '11 at 09:18

11 Answers11

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My mouse lags over menus too! For menus that are grayed out, it is fine. But for active menus, the mouse feels sticky when moving over them.

One solution i tried and it works is disable rich user experience and disable hardware acceleration.

Tools -> Options -> Environment (General) -> Visual Experience -> uncheck Use hardware graphics accelerator if available.

I have a good graphic card, but stopping visual studio from using graphics hardware makes my mouse sooo smooth now!

Harvey Darvey
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Visual Studio is actually quite fast if used properly. For example, I have solution with 45 projects (~600000 loc) that works fine.

It's probably an installed extension that kills the IDE (things like Resharper for example can be memory greedy - disclaimer: I have nothing against Resharper, I use it myself :-).

Here is a link to disable extensions (read also the comments): How to: Disable and Re-enable Visual Studio Tools and Extensions

Simon Mourier
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  • @Lefti - Strange. Can you dump out the list of DLLs attached to the devenv.exe process (using a tool such as SysInternal's Process Explorer). Maybe this will give you some clue. – Simon Mourier Mar 29 '11 at 06:47
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    Fair enough...but quite fast isn't exactly accurate. Microsoft's own reps have boasted that "Visual Studio 2010 is only 30% slower than Visual Studio 2008!!" – Jeff Dec 11 '11 at 22:16
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Thanks for all the replies.

I've switched to using visual c++ express, it's much quicker, now I can actually do some coding.

Best solution I have for now.

2

Sounds like to much open and very large files to me - then syntax highlighting and IntelliSense can become very complex to calculate. Maybe you also suffer from some Add-Ons.

mbx
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Does it also happen when you open up VS2010 and create a new project? If not, there might be something wrong with the the solution or project files. Removing the .suo and .sdf files sometimes helps.

Another thing you can try is install VS2010 on another machine to see if it's related to just your machine.

Did you open Resource Monitor in the task manager? It's able to show you disk I/O, it might show you that your virus scanner is accessing everything (happened on my machine).

Hope this helps.

Sebastiaan

Sebastiaan M
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  • Tried it, doesn't look like the anti-virus is responsible (tried disabling it too). I'll try another machine when I can. –  Mar 29 '11 at 19:10
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Do you have multiple monitors? I experience issues with this if I place the visual studio window on the 2nd screen of my workstation I get mouse lag and other such issues close to what you experience. Although it's close enough to usable for me, but this machine is also running SQL Server which could explain some slowdowns. Make sure that unnecessary services aren't running (like say SQL if you dont need it) and that might help. Also make sure if you are using any extensions that they are the latest (mostly concering memory leak issues with older versions of Resharper).

Jesus Ramos
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  • That is really odd then, you might want to check what development settings you have enabled then to see if there are things that you don't need which are hogging resources. – Jesus Ramos Mar 30 '11 at 13:28
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Try to uninstall Windows Pen Input service (do not simply disable it, otherwise File->Open will stop working in VS, yeah I know...).

Disable intellisense completely (to see if that has anything to do with it). If it helps, start enabling it back until it fails again.

Eugene
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I have been tasked with upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 (Professional) from 2005 in my place of work, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I somewhat regret making the switch. The IDE is noticeably - no, significantly slower - than VS 2005. I now wish we switched to VS2008 instead. This is all very worrying because then I'll be seen as the one who made the made the switch and I'll be facing all the negative remarks. I installed SP1 which didn't make much of a difference.

One solution, ~50 projects, 1 MLOC. Windows 7 x64, Intel i7 950 @ 3.07GHz, 4GB of RAM. Pretty well-spec'd machine, I would say.

Mohamed Bana
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Windows 7, x64, 12GB memory, very slow right clicks:

The following steps fixed the problem for me. Right click is now instantaneous. Your Mileage may vary:

I deleted the following directory: %AppData%Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0

and reinstalled these three packages from the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate DVD

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Data-Tier Application Framework with this command: \WCU\DAC\DACFramework_enu.msi

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Data-Tier Application Project: \WCU\DAC\DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Transact-SQL Language Service: \WCU\DAC\TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi

Noah
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I have also experienced very slow performance of Visual Studio 2010. After trying various things, I realised that I had enabled Fuslogvw.exe (Assembly Binding Log Viewer, AKA Fusion Log Viewer). It was writing out assembly binding logs to a directory on my hard drive. This was then being scanned by my Anti-Virus on-access-scanning, which was grinding Visual Studio to a halt.

As soon as I modified the configuration of the on-access-scanning to exclude the directory to which the assembly log was written everything went a lot faster. Disabling the Assembly Binding logging obviously had the same effect.

Details on Fuslogvw.exe here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e74a18c4.aspx

An answer on stackoverflow relating to anti-virus scanning here: Slowdown of Microsoft Visual Studio due to different Virus scanner

In summary, my answer is to make sure that Fuslogvw.exe is not enabled and/or exclude its log directory from your on-access virus scanner.

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Captain Whippet
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Maybe it's your antivirus. Temporarily disable it and see if VS works better.

Luka Ramishvili
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