Visual Studio debugging painfully slow when loading symbols

Question

I have an issue which is practically similar to Visual Studio debugging/loading very slow but I haven\'t managed to find a solution to such a problem.

I have tried all w

Answer 1

As per the comment by rkawano - turning off the Fusion Log can sometimes fix this problem (it did for me). I had enabled the fusion log after reading the following article and then forgot about it. After some time I started experiencing a significant slowdown of visual studio 2013. The symptom is that VS 2013 becomes unresponsive, particularly when ending a debug session. It will also display symbol loading dialogs when loading a project or stopping the debugger (these are not typically shown).

Answer 2

I had the same issue while hosting my project on a local network share. Moving it to my local System reduced Symbol-Loading times by 90%!

Answer 3

Have you tried bypassing IIS express and running the application from your local IIS server? The url would look something like this: localhost/{yourprojectname}. You might still have a slow load the first time you hit the application, but after that it should stay pretty snappy because Visual Studio won't be starting the app every time you want to run it. Running the application from your local IIS also allows you to keep Firefox open when you start the debugger instead of opening and closing IE every time.

Answer 4

Try any of the following ...

1. Enable Just My Code
   Go to Tools > Options > Debugging > General
   Check "Enable Just my Code"
   
   
   

2. Cache Symbols Locally
   Go to Tools > Options > Debugging > Symbols Browse to local directory (make sure it's not on a network share) Click "Load All Symbols" or run the project to hydrate the cache

   
   
   

3. Remove Remote Symbol Servers

   When you select a remote symbol server, Visual Studio gives you the following warning:

   The performance of remote symbols stores can vary due to latency, bandwidth, or availability of servers. Debugging performance can be improved by selecting the option to load only specified modules when enabling this server

   After loading your symbol cache, deselect remote symbols servers

   Go to Tools > Options > Debugging > Symbols Deselect "Microsoft Symbol Servers" to prevent Visual Studio from remotely querying the Microsoft servers.

Further Reading

Stack Overflow

• Visual Studio debugging/loading very slow
• Visual Studio Build Very Slow
• Slow startup with IIS Express
• Website takes a long time to start after solution build

MS Docs

• Visual Studio debugger documentation
• Debug only user code with Just My Code
• Specify symbol (.pdb) and source files in the Visual Studio debugger
• Debugger Settings and Preparation

Answer 5

In my case, I had a file open in VS that was not part of my current solution (it happened to be an XML file which I had marked with breakpoints for quick-reference). When I removed those particular breakpoints, the issue resolved.

Answer 6

I had the same slow-loading issue, but it was plaguing only one sandbox solution. Very similar staging and production/copy solutions were working just fine. So all these environmental tweaks folks were recommending couldn't explain it (I tried them anyway, of course.) Then I compared the .csproj files and found a suspicious looking difference. After correcting that, things got back to normal.