Visual Studio Troubleshooting

Suggestions for Improving the Performance of Visual Studio

Install the Following Patches

• Scrolling Context Menu
• Find and Replace Dialog Grows
• Cut or Copy Displays "Insufficient Memory"

Defragment Your Hard Drive

We have observed significant performance improvements for disk I/O intensive operations after defragmenting the hard drive. This is especially true on Windows XP, which does not have the SuperFetch feature that ships in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Download the Latest Service Pack for your Operating System

If you are using Windows XP:

• Disable Graphics Hardware Rendering - we have found that some Windows XP graphics drivers have bugs that result in crashes when video hardware acceleration is used.
• Install the Windows Automation API 3.0 - you can find additional information about this API on the Performance Engineering Blog.

Disable Add-Ins and Extensions

(Tools|Options|Environment -> Add-in/Macros Security, and Extension Manager)

• If this works, check with the Add-In/Extension provider to see if they have an updated version. For example, ReSharper 5.1.1 has performance and memory consumption improvements.
• Decide if this improves performance, then experiment by selectively disabling add-ins to determine which one is affecting your performance.
• You can run Visual Studio without any add-ins by launching in safe mode (devenv /safemode).

If you are experiencing slow performance when loading a solution:

Try deleting the .suo file in your solution's folder. Note that the .suo file is a hidden file. You can find information on File Types and File Extensions in Visual Studio in the Library.

If you are experiencing UI performance problems (e.g., typing, scrolling):

• Disable Graphics Hardware Rendering
• Some users have reported that they experience better performance using software rendering on the following hardware:

If you are running inside a VM or on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V enabled:

• Disable Graphics Hardware Rendering
• Make sure you have at least 1.5GB allocated to the Virtual Machine.
• Make sure you have hardware virtualization support on at the BIOS level. This is required for Hyper-V, it may not be available on older hardware.

If you are experiencing slow builds:

• Decrease the build output verbosity by selecting either Quiet, Minimal or Normal (in increasing order of volume/output).

• Minimize the number of projects in the solution.
• Remove redundant references from projects.
• Do not build setup/deploy projects in the debug configuration.

Use a 64-bit Operating System and 4GB of Physical Memory

Double the virtual memory available to Visual Studio from 2GB to 4GB. By using 4GB of physical memory, you will reduce the amount of paging to/from disk.