UPDATE (Nov 2014): Given how many hits this and the Speeding up Visual Studio post are generating, I have to warn you that VS 2010 is seriously old. With the new Visual Studio version you can still compile for XP and there is no point in continuing to use VS 2010 anymore, unless you are already using it — and pushing a deadline. Please read the last section of this post to find the links to the free and commercial version of VS.
(Jan 2011) : Awe sh*t! After 2 months of active use I can say for sure, Visual Studio has some serious problems with speed. I didn’t have the IDE crash on me, but it’s just too slow for any large project. Tried everything possible, cleaned out the cache, recreated the intellisense files but the program still keeps slowing down for no apparent reason. It’s really annoying when the program suddenly gets into a heavy disk access mode, to the point where even typing becomes impossible. I have racked my brains and fiddled with every possible tweak I could find on the web without success. Since our entire project is now moved over to VS 10 it’s too late to turn back now 🙁 !!
UPDATE: I finally managed to fix Visual Studio 10. Please read the post Speeding up Visual Studio.
Update (Not really): Neither me nor most programmers I know who are using VS 10 could solve this issue satisfactorily. I would recommend moving projects to Visual Studio 2012. It is much better and more stable than VS 2010. It’s been out for a while now and there’s no point in continuing with VS 2010 that clearly has some issues with speed and disk access.
Visual Studio 2012 : http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads
Visual Studio 2012 Express : http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-studio-express-products
It’s time to move on to the latest version of Visual Studio or if you are an Indie/Hobbyist then to the free Visual Studio Community Edition.
Yup, I have a similar if no the same issue. I turned off intellisense and that seems to have helped quite a bit. But I’m still not sure if it’s the real cause. I’m going to play some more with the intellisense settings to see what I find.
Did you figure anything else out?
Running intel I7 3.0Ghz 6GB Ram 64 Bit Windows 7.
Thanks!
Did you try updating the automation API? But I guess Win7 already has the very latest API version. Read this.
https://blog.susheelspace.com/2010/11/speeding-up-visual-studio-2010-on-xp-and-vista/
It seems people have had some success by turning off plugins/extensions.
Other than that I too suffer from apparent slowdowns now and then and the only real solution I found to work is a complete restart of the system 🙁 (Not much of a solution is it?) One of my friend works with CodeLite http://www.codelite.org/.
Please read the post https://blog.susheelspace.com/2010/11/speeding-up-visual-studio-2010-on-xp-and-vista/ .
Most of the problems were fixed after that.
Susheel, I followed your posts and guidelines which are very good but when compiling or building large projects I still experienced extremely slow speeds. I searched online for some acceleration software that support Visual Studio, and bumped into this grid computing softwarem, Incredibuild for Visual Studio. I have 6 machines right now that I always use, I am testing their trial version/period. Have you ever heard/tried them before?
@Roey
Nope! To tell you the truth, I never really could solve the problem satisfactorily. There were speed issues with VS 2010 all the time. We’ve now switched to VC++ Express 2012. No problems thus far. But from what I could gather after analyzing VS 2010 was the fact that there were too many page faults and cache misses that were occurring. It means the software itself wasn’t well optimized, and there is nothing you or I can do about it.
Considering the amount of hits this blog post is getting, I say a lot of people are in a similar predicament.
I’ll def look into switching out of VS 2010 in order to make life easier…Thanks again. I appreciate the feedback.
Actually vs2012 is much slower and buggy than 2010. Crashes every day, multi-second slowdowns when saving/switching tabs etc.
@Baast
Sorry to hear about that. What are you using VS 2012 for?
VS or rather VC++ 2012 has never crashed on me and my projects aren’t small at all. To be fair though, I am using VC++ 2012 express edition and I rarely use VS for any other kind of development. Most of my web-dev is done using Notepad++ and that includes PHP development.
Are you using some plugins? Try turning them off one by one to see if one (or a couple) of them is(are) causing problems. Have you tried regenerating the intellisense files? This maybe a long-shot, but try and see if updating the graphics drives helps.
I had a lot of luck in speeding up VS 2010, by removing one of the extensions that I had recently installed. Specifically, a T4 template editing extension. Apparently, it thought that it should try to analyze each and every file regardless of the file type.
As to using Notepad++ for development, more power to you. I remember using editors like that way back in the day, and I do not have any desire to be luddite of development. Having a single interface to manage Intellisense, builds, debugging, test runs, and all the other actions required for a good application is priceless regardless of the language.
No Scott, I never said that you can replace Visual Studio with Notepad++. I said I do web-development with Notpade++. I am not a web-dev, I only sometimes do web-dev, and that too for my smallish websites. 99.9% of the time I do C++ and Java and work with IDEs like Visual C++ express, CodeLite, Eclipse, Netbeans.
There is no real replacement for IDEs if you want to do serious development.
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