Visual Studio incredibly slow when renaming files

Question

I have a medium-sized solution with 99 projects that has recently started behaving weirdly:

1) If I try to rename a file through the solution explorer, VS will seem

Answer 1

Unfortunately 99 projects is not a medium sized solution for Visual Studio but instead a very large solution. Visual Studio simply doesn't scale well to solutions of this size and you're seeing the effects of that here.

The only way to make this better is to factor out your solution into several smaller solutions.

Answer 2

Building on @Daniel Barbalace's answer, my issue indeed had to do with TFS, but I could not switch to server workspaces. What I ended up doing was removing the mappings to any branches or projects that I am not working on at the moment. There is no magic number but once I seemed to get under 50,000 files (globally for the TFS folder) renaming suddenly went down from 2+ minutes to 3-5 seconds.

Answer 3

When testing I'd made an attempt at setting up one of the projects to build on a different server, both in Debug and Release mode. I though I'd cleaned up both, but apparently I'd only done so under the Debug configuration.

Apparently meanwhile that server has decided it hates my machine, which makes my machine freeze while waiting for it.

Closing Visual Studio and manually editing the .csproj file solved the problem.

Answer 4

Visual Studio can be extremely slow in renaming files if you are using TFS with a "local" workspace as oppose to a "server" workspace, and the total number of files including different versions in the TFS repository exceeds 10,000 items.

Contrary to Microsoft's recommendation, I suggest using a server workspace instead of a local one for much better performance. There are also some other downsides to local workspaces and the only upside is being able to work while your TFS repository is down. That's not much of an upside considering if you can't connect to TFS, you probably can't connect to your LAN and there's darn little work you can do anyway in that situation.

To change to a server workspace for TFS in Visual Studio 2015,

1. In VS click on File --> Source Control --> Advanced --> Workspaces

2. In the dialog that opens, select your workspace and click Edit...

3. Click Advanced... (it does not matter which mapping is selected).

4. Under Location, select Server and then press OK.

Switching over to server may take ten minutes or more depending on the size of your repository.

Once this is done, renaming files should be nearly instantaneous.