VS 2010 very slow

Question

I have just upgraded to VS 2010, and I have performance problems which I did not have before (in VS 2008).

The most annoying thing is that it freezes while I work in

Answer 1

If you can, buy an SSD disk and move all your projects locally. I find VS2010 super intensive on disk. It fly on my home machine with an SSD but it's almost unusable on my work machine(Win7 4 gig RAM, but standard disk)

Answer 2

Try setting the number of parallel builds to half the number of cores you have (I think its in options, settings, Solutions and Project, build and run).. I had it set to 8 which was too much.. it spawned 8 msbuild.exe, rebuilding a solution with 70 projects bottlenecked the disk when they all tried to read/writte similar pre-compiled headers. Those msbuild's stick around even after you close the IDE.

Also I disabled the gather browsing info for implicit files, which made intellisense parsing quicker.

Answer 3

An old post I know, but in case it helps others (as the previous answers focused on source code)...

I found that it wasn't my source code that was the issue, that was held locally along with all the references, but the default locations (project, project templates and item templates) as these were held on a networked drive. These can be altered in the Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions.

Alternatively you could change the frequency of the saves or turn them off altogether via Tools -> Options -> AutoRecover

Answer 4

VS is great if you do what microsoft recommends and work on a local copy of your projects. As soon as you start tying to open projects in remote locations you will get this issue.

Recommendations:

1. use a source control solution.
2. create a copy of your project locally and run the solution from that.

Also ...

I think it does it's clever stuff in the background, I found the more i use it the faster it gets, especially on long running projects that I regularly go back to.

If you think it might be aformentioned WPF framework you may want to try switching off aero (as a test) if it helps the problem is likely that your chosen graphics hardware is not very good at effect or 3D based output so it's struggling.

Also try reducing the number of background services and apps you have running.

on windows 7 these days 4 gigs of ram is considered standard, so whilst it should perform fine maybe consider putting more ram in if you are trying to handle large datasets / similar business applications.

Another thing you could try is run a repair install over the top of your existing, it may not have cleanly installed something ... unlikely but it may help.