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

For me, the SP1 setup was stuck for several hours so I searched the Internet and found lots of people complaining about SP1 being slow (once they manage to install it!) so I cancelled the upgrade. The rollback also remained stuck. After many hours, I had to shut down the computer. Then, Windows Update tried to update .NET 4 and the update was frozen. Even when shutting down won't resolve this as Windows needs to finish installing updates before shutting down, so the only way to unfreeze it was to do a physical reboot. Now my Visual Studio 2010 installation is broken, I'm currently re-installing it...

Considering my experience and everything I read about it, I would advise to stay away from this service pack. Microsoft used to have a bad reputation for reliability (Win95-WinME era) but has been doing great in the last years. They seem to have came back again to their unreliable releases problems. Lots of people criticize Bill Gates, but I have to say... software quality isn't the same since he left. He truly was a genius.

Edit: repairing Visual Studio reported several errors and 3 unimportant components failed to install. However, Visual Studio wouldn't open because SP1 was only partially installed. I went to the control panel and uninstalled the partial SP1. Visual Studio still doesn't open, so I need to repair the installation a second time. Lots of hassles for a service pack...

Answer 2

Trinition - I got te same problem of one of the core i7 cores running at 100% and it killed Vs 2010. But it was running at 100% even if vs wasn't loaded. Initially I thought it was a hardware problem so moved the disk to an identically configured PC. One core still ran at 100%. I ran malwarebytes across the system but It didn't report anything, and nor did my AV. My workstation was so slow, I had to scroll back through backups until i found one that was ok. It was really weird and I didn't find out the cause. I think something Malicious was the cause though.

What was worse was, shortly after this, vs went haywire: every time I loaded it, it replicated another copy of all the components in the toolbox. Uninstalling sp1 and repairing vs2010 ad them reinstalling sp1 and other components fixed, but all in all I lost two days to something for which I still have no explanation. Wish I'd found your entry about the 100% core at the time: it didn't show up on google 'cos that's exactly wat i searched for.

Barry

Answer 3

I emailed ReSharper support and they were helpful enough to point out that there is a known issue with the Productivity Power tools add-on not playing nice with ReSharper. They asked me to disable the Productivity Power Tools and see if performance returned to normal.

I disabled the Productivity Power Tools and my Visual Studio with SP1 seems to behave normally again. This is an acceptable solution for me since the only part of the tools I used was the Document Tab Well, the rest seem pretty worthless to me. JetBrains is a really good company so I'm sure they will work on resolving the issue, or at least work with MS to determine which the problem is caused by.

Though my own hunch has me thinking the Productivity Power Tools are the culprit and not ReSharper.

Kind of ironic that the "Productivity" Power Tools were making me much less productive.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Try to remove resharper, I had problems like yours when I had it

Answer 6

The only extension I have in VS 2010 is Resharper. CPU is Intel Core2 Quad 6600, 4Gb RAM.

After installing SP1 I've noticed memory leakage, CPU time for devenv is 25% on standby, scrolling, changing the position of cursor and switching tabs take several seconds.

See blog post here