Visual Studio 2008 Is Pretty Damn Slow…
January 30, 2008
Wipe out, originally uploaded by Kyknoord.
Update: The speed issues I complained about in the original version of this post have been remedied (as far as I can tell) by “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 - KB946581″ which you can find here: Downloadable Hotfix: Performance and Editor fixes for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Thanks to David and Cameron from Microsoft for helping me out with this!
If you’d like to read the original post, you can find it below, but keep in mind that most of this rant is now moot. Enjoy! 
Disclaimer: I will *happily* post a retraction to this rant if *anyone* can tell me how to make Visual Studio 2008 perform like Visual Studio 2005 did, or better. My intention here is not to offend (despite the title of this post) but to pique some interest in the community as to how to speed up this beast of a program.I’m a software engineer for a web development company, developing code in C# and ASP.NET. Thus, the tool I use most in my daily work, of course, is Visual Studio. I’ve been happily using Visual Studio 2005, well, since 2005, and have enjoyed it thoroughly. Everything it does (for me), it does well, from IntelliSense to the integration with source control. So, when my company decided to upgrade all its developers’ copies of Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008, I had no reservations. I’d heard about things like better JavaScript handling (with IntelliSense as well), split Design/Code view in Web Developer, and, well, it just looked slicker than 2005 in general.
Now, less than a couple months after our upgrade, I use a text editor (Notepad2, for what it’s worth) almost exclusively for writing and modifying code. Why? Because Visual Studio 2008 is slow, unwieldy, slow, memory hogging and *really damn slow*.
(I see this the majority of the time Visual Studio is open.)
I have tried everything I can possibly think of to wrestle with this beast. Cleaned my hard drive, reinstalled Windows XP, installed VS2008, removed all components but Web Developer and C#/ASP.net (no C++, VB, mobile development tools, etc.). Before you ask, my development machine has the following specs:
- Intel Centrino (Core Duo T2300) @ 1.66GHz
- 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM
- 80GB SATA2 Hard Drive
Not the fastest machine on the block, but it should be more than sufficient to do web development. Typically, when I’m doing web development, I have four programs open: Outlook, Visual Studio, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Even with only these four programs open and only two tabs open in each browser, I see the (Not Responding) message in Visual Studio’s title bar more often than not.
Loading the environment takes anywhere from 30 seconds (fast) to two minutes (most of the time). Closing the program takes about the same amount of time. Opening a C# source code file takes 15-20 seconds, with the hourglass spinning and most of the time the window won’t repaint at all during this time. If I make the rare mistake of attempting to click into “Design” mode when viewing an ASPX page, my whole system locks up. No response from any windows, and even Ctrl+Alt+Delete takes 5-10 seconds to slowly paint the dialog with its options.
Possibly the most disappointing part of all this is the fact that Visual Studio 2008 was touted for its speed increases.
So, to wrap this up, if you have some good tips or tricks for (drastically) speeding up the performance of Visual Studio 2008, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you, and I’m sure a lot of other Visual Studio 2008 users would love to hear from you as well.
January 30, 2008 at 11:17 pm
For what it’s worth (and hopefully this helps), I’ve found some tips at “.NET Tip of the Day” to speed things up:
http://dotnettipoftheday.org/tips/optimize_launch_of_vs2005.aspx
http://dotnettipoftheday.org/tips/speedup_visual_studio.aspx
January 30, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Will - I’m sorry to hear you are hitting performance issues with VS2008. If you can give us some additional data offline we’ll see if we can help resolve the problems.
thanks!
Jason
January 30, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I’m sorry to hear that your experience with VS2008’s performance hasn’t been as good as most of our customers. Please e-mail me at DevPerf@Microsoft.com and let’s see if we can’t understand what the performance issues are.
Regards,
David Berg
Microsoft Developer Division
Performance Engineering Team
January 31, 2008 at 12:00 am
Thank you, Jason and David for your quick responses!
(And sorry for the post title, I’m just a little frustrated right now.
January 31, 2008 at 12:17 am
[...] its programmers are on the ball. Shortly after I posted my last entry (Visual 2008…
and left a comment on this blog, two programmers from Microsoft left comments offering assistance [...]
February 11, 2008 at 6:27 pm
WOW!!!
I thought I was crazy until I saw your blog…I feel much better now.
I am having almost word for word the same problem you are having with Visual Studio 2008. I have a Toshiba Laptop with 1.66 GHz speed Centrino Duo Processor. I have 94 Gigs of HD and 2 Gig Memory.
When I use VS2005 I get no noticiable problems and use to develop 2.0 apps. But when I want to jump to 3.x apps or just to use VS with the 2.0 Framework option….FREEZE FREEZE FREEZE.
I get the painting not refreshing the screen, I get my IDE to stop and I get a splitting headache!
Please point me to any fixes you have found subsequent to your post…
THank YOU!!!!
February 11, 2008 at 7:15 pm
The problem seems to be solved…
It is that your processor speed is below the recomended minimums…
See the requirements site:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts2008/products/bb933744.aspx
Sorry but I have the same issue…!
February 11, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Lorne,
Thanks for your comment! I’ve been working with a couple engineers at Microsoft since I wrote this post and they’ve been kind enough to post a hotfix which should fix this issue. I’ve just installed it myself, and haven’t really gotten to run VS2008 through its paces yet, but it seems promising:
Here’s their blog post:
Downloadable Hotfix: Performance and Editor fixes for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008
And here’s a direct link to the hotfix:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=10826
February 11, 2008 at 7:26 pm
[...] and Editor fixes for VS2008… In regard to my previous post, Visual Studio 2008 Is Pretty Damn Slow, a couple engineers from Microsoft have contacted me to let me know that a hotfix has been made [...]
February 27, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Hi,
How did things get after you installed the hotfix?
For me things just get worse, no it’s freezez soon as I click the editor window, it is impossible to do anything. And the hotfix can’t be unistalled either?
February 27, 2008 at 9:22 pm
kimf,
Thank you for your comment. For me, VS2008 got *waaay* faster after I installed the hotfix. That hotfix seems to have addressed the main issues I was concerned about, such as delays when opening source files, finding references, etc. There are some things that are still a little slow, but not unreasonably so like they used to be when I first wrote this post.
I’m curious as to what speed issues you’re still having with VS2008 yourself. When does it seem the slowest or freeze the most?
February 29, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I just installed the hot fix and WOW, the results are amazing! I have a AMD 2.2 Dual Core with 4 gigs of ram on XP x64 system and VS2008 was dragging, it was almost enough to start looking for an alternative IDE. Thanks to the engineers that took the time to fix this annoying problem, now if we could just get them to fix the freakin issue with not being able to click the Enter key to submit a form.
March 27, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Well, after weeks of frustration I’ve found out that disabling Antivirus software resolves the problem for me.
May 5, 2008 at 9:04 am
I’ve installed the fix and tried disabling anti-virus. Still, there is a long wait after detaching.
June 5, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Well I applied the hotfix, it’s still just as slow as ever. And EVERYTHING is slow. It takes about a second before you can use a scroll bar or click a button, selecting text 5-6 seconds. Typing code 2-3 seconds delay. It’s crazy.
June 7, 2008 at 5:54 pm
The slowness could also be caused the breakpoints. the following site has the solution to save breakpoint and re load breakpoints. it is very useful.
http://saurabhramya.googlepages.com/save%26loadbreakpointsinvisualstudio
July 2, 2008 at 11:05 am
OMG it’s so slow, even with the SP. I can’t take it.
pls ms fix this issue.
July 9, 2008 at 12:46 am
Is there any fix for WinForms designer?
We have a really big solution with lots of components and controls. So, when any (even empty) form is opened in designer for the first time, VS freezes for about 15 minutes (probably, refreshes Toolbox, but who knows…).
And even more annoying thing happens (but not always) when I change control’s name in the designer: VS starts refactoring the whole solution, which usualy takes several minutes. Controls are private members, there’s no point to search their names outside the form class, so why does renaming take so long?
July 9, 2008 at 11:11 am
Alex, that’s a really long time to load - much longer than I originally experienced before I loaded the hotfix; can you post a list (even a brief one) of components and plugins you’re loading with Visual Studio? I had experienced some slowness related to loading some older Telerik controls, as well as a delay upon opening while using VisualSVN, but again, not nearly that long.
Thanks for commenting, by the way!
July 9, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Well, I don’t use any additional plugins, only the default stuff that comes with VS 2008 Pro.
As for the components list, it will not tell you much. I guess: these are mainly our own components. Looks like each time when we create a component (typed dataset, service, custom control), it is added to the toolbox, so now it contains real big number of items (~100 - 150). However, 15 minutes for adding 100 items to Toolbox is too much for me.
July 10, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I agree, 15 minutes is pretty ridiculous.
Have you tried using Process Explorer to see which handles/dlls VS2008 is opening while you’re waiting for it to load?