Can Visual Studio Be Any Slower?

[Bob L.]

Hi everyone,

I am working on converting a VB6 project to .NET, and I am astounded at how
amazingly slow Visual Studio is when loading a solution. For example, I have
a solution with 11 class library projects, and it takes 40 seconds to load
on a 1.8 GHz machine. Does anyone know what is going on? Is there any way to
turn off the compiler when loading?

Thanks,
Bob L.

 

[Rakesh Rajan]

Hi Bob,

I haven't felt VSNET to be *that* slow. In fact, in my small 600Mhx Duron,
with 192 RAM, i could load a 6 project solution in around 10 seconds. Maybe
something else could be the issue.

Moreover, i don't think the compiler gets invoked while *loading* a
solution.

- Rakesh

 

[Hermit Dave]

well it could be a lot of references here and there... i think it does
reference check. Plus if you are opening web project it has to contact the
server... sync the offline cache.. and so on and so forth.

You said you had a 1.8 Ghz machine. How much RAM do you have. What is the
available Memory normally. What is the Harddrive speed... how defragged is
you hard drive. The list could go on and on.
VS.NET is a lot heavier on memory requirements as long as you have that
sorted you should be fine.

--

Regards,

Hermit Dave
(http://hdave.blogspot.com)

 

[Bob L.]

It could be the references - we do have quite a few, but I didn't think VS
would choke so quickly. I have 256 MB of RAM (2 year old Dell). Loading
performance is fine if I keep the project count low, but degrades
dramatically as the number increases. It's almost like VS wasn't designed to
handle large projects. Since these are just class library projects on my
hard drive, there is no server activity.

I do notice that my task list (warnings and errors) grows and shrinks with a
variety of messages as each project is loaded. After everything is loaded,
all the messages disappear and I can compile successfully.

Our project has over 60 projects, and although I don't plan on loading them
all at once, I was hoping I could at least load a subset fairly efficiently.

- Bob

 

[Hermit Dave]

256 Megs of RAM. I know it used to be fine with Visual Studio. For a
developer box i would suggest atleast 512 Megs.
Go to task manager and under processor check the size of devenv. Add a bit
more memory.. it will make it a bit more responsive.
Plus how many apps do you have running at the same time... trust me if you
say more than one... add memory.

If you are using XP... you need to add memory. Processor is not a problem...
i can run VS.Net 2k3 on 1Ghz P3 but even then half a gig of memory... My dev
server has gig and half of memory and my dev box has gig of memory.

--

Regards,

Hermit Dave
(http://hdave.blogspot.com)

 

[Bob L.]

Since VB6 doesn't really run well on XP with large projects, we are still on
Windows 2000 Pro - at least until we finish our conversion to .NET.

This definitely does not look like a memory issue. I checked my memory usage
with 9 projects loaded and the total commit charge is around 214 MB. To
illustrate the performance degredation, loading 9 projects takes about 22
seconds. When I add 2 more project (11 total) it takes about 48 seconds.
Adding the extra 2 projects takes up an additional 6 megs of memory (for
loading about 1 MB of source code. Hmmm - slow *and* fat).

I appreciate your troubleshooting, but it just looks like VS is not designed
to perform well with large projects, even if references is the culprit!

- Bob

 

[Hermit Dave]

Adding the extra 2 projects takes up an additional 6 megs of memory (for

loading about 1 MB of source code. Hmmm - slow *and* fat).

hmmm vs.net is hungry on memory. that is one of the reasons why i said your
will need more memory.

Also look for Commit Charge and then Under Physical Memory >> Available. As
long as Available <= Commit you are fine. After that point you will run into
performance degradation due to system using paging file to swap around..

Lastly... VS.NET is fine with large project... though not fine with large
number of references... it does have to do a check.
1 solution with 1 Project is decent.
1 solution with hell lot of projects and internally referencing on
another.... thats a different ball game.

--

Regards,

Hermit Dave
(http://hdave.blogspot.com)