Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Performance

Question

I\'ve noticed since installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 that I\'m having huge performance issues. It will randomly freeze up on me quite a bit.

I had no performance issues

Answer 1

First, just to clarify -- when you say it freezes, does it eventually recover? Or do you have to kill & restart VS? If you have to kill & restart, then you most likely have a configuration problem of some sort, and the rest of my answer would be less relevant. :-)

If it does eventually recover, then I'd wonder where the performance bottleneck is. Is your disk busy the whole time it's frozen? Is CPU pegged at 100% (or perhaps a smaller number for multi-core environments)? Do you have enough RAM to support whatever programs are running without too much swapping to disk? Built-in Windows tools like Task Manager and Performance Monitor, or SysInternals tools like DiskMon and Process Monitor, can help you narrow it down.

Personally I've found disk to be the most frequent bottleneck for VS, Outlook, Eclipse, and many other resource-intensive programs. If you discover that disk is the problem, I'd strongly suggest upgrading to a solid-state drive -- if you haven't already done so and have the option to do so. That might sound drastic, and in a sense it's just "throwing hardware at the problem," but it's the single most significant performance boost I've experienced on a laptop or workstation in a LONG time.

For what it's worth, I haven't found a significant difference in performance between VS2010 and VS2010 SP1, and I'm running XP 32-bit on a ~2-year-old laptop with a solid-state drive. I'm not aware of any SP1 changes that would make VS substantially more disk-intensive.