Visual Studio 2010 very slow, unusable

Question

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, it

Answer 1

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).

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.