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

I tried all solutions and nothing seemed to work. I cracked open my symbol settings TOOLS > Options > Debugging > Symbols and found the Cache Symbols in this directory set to another user's directory e.g. C:\Users\<not my name>\AppData\Local\Temp\SymbolCache

I then cleared the setting string by making it empty, and removed any other pdb locations configured. Then press OK.

Then I kicked off a build and allowed VS to resolve those symbols (20 sec). I then stopped and restarted, and launched without loading symbols.

I'm assuming somewhere down the line I imported settings from another user.

Answer 2

Go to Tools>Options>Environment>Add In Security Uncheck "allow add in components to load" Restart Visual Studio

Answer 3

My VS2013 was painfully slow when debugging due to slow loading symbols. I noticed, during the slow loading, my network usage was very high though my app does not access it.

As an experiment, I unplugged my Ethernet cable and debugging was very fast. My symbols DownstreamStore was located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\DownstreamStore. Under Tools\Debugging\Symbols, I cleared the cache and when I attempted to exit, I received a message that it required administrator privileges to continue.

It may have been the permissions (that have probably changed since 2013) that was causing the symbols to be loaded from the Internet. I changed the directory to another, nonadministrative location on my flash drive and debugged. It was very slow the first time, but thereafter, it is was very fast.