Visual Studio 6.0 excrutiatingly slow under XP SP2

[Charles]

I have Visual Studio 6.0 stand-alone (with C++) and as part of Compaq
Visual Fortran 6.6c.

I am moving my development from a Win 98 SE machine w/2x 10 Gb HDD (each
w/ 1Gb free), 768 Mb RAM to a 3.2 MHz Win XP Pro machine w/147 Gb HDD
(121 Gb free) and 2 Gb RAM.

Loading a particular project with Fortran code only with about 80 files
and 750 Mb of source code on Win 98 takes 15 seconds until the editor is
ready to use.

Loading the same project on the Win XP Pro machine takes 10-20 minutes.
Also takes forever on my wife's 2.4 GHz Dell machine with 640 Mb.

I have searched and destroyed with SpyBot and Ad-Aware, removed the
ctfmon.exe using MS approved procedures, uninstalled Office 2003
completely with no success.

If I boot in safe mode, or if I do a clean boot (really clean, bare
minimum), the project loads in 40 seconds.

Compilation and linking are very fast. Everything else I run on this
machine is very fast. Loading and editing files is very slow. Inserting
a linen of code at line 235 of a 130 line file takes minutes. Takes 18
seconds in clean boot mode.

Opening a new file in the project for editing allows for plenty of time
to make a cup of coffee or get a beer and a snack.

I need to develop under XP because some of the bugs encountered by my
users do not show up running under Win 98 SE.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what is causing this problem and
what to do about it? Is there a service pack?

This is very frustrating. I can't be the only one having this problem.

Thanks in advance,

Charles.

 

[Willy Denoyette [MVP]]

Not sure why you are posting this on a C++ language NG, anyway, 2GB RAM and
640MB RAM is quite a difference isn't it?
I would suggest you contact HP (the actual owner of Visual Fortran) for such
things like memory requirement and related performance issues.
Willy.

 

[Arnaud Debaene]

I have Visual Studio 6.0 stand-alone (with C++) and as part of Compaq
Visual Fortran 6.6c.

I am moving my development from a Win 98 SE machine w/2x 10 Gb HDD
(each w/ 1Gb free), 768 Mb RAM to a 3.2 MHz Win XP Pro machine w/147
Gb HDD (121 Gb free) and 2 Gb RAM.

Loading a particular project with Fortran code only with about 80
files and 750 Mb of source code on Win 98 takes 15 seconds until the
editor is ready to use.

Loading the same project on the Win XP Pro machine takes 10-20
minutes. Also takes forever on my wife's 2.4 GHz Dell machine with
640 Mb.

Have you got an anti-virus? If so, configure it so that it doesn't scan your
source and intermediate files. Also, use a tool like Process Explorer
(www.sysinternals.com) or perfmon to actually see what is taking so much
time (either a process, either disk access, either...) while your project is
loading.

Arnaud
MVP - VC

 

[Charles]

Not sure why you are posting this on a C++ language NG, anyway, 2GB RAM and
640MB RAM is quite a difference isn't it?

Sure is. I would expect new machine to be twice as fast, maybe faster.
Instead it is almost 100 times slower. But only for loading source files
into Visual Studio. Everything else is much faster.

I am looking for others who may have had problems with MSVS running slow
on XP.

I would suggest you contact HP (the actual owner of Visual Fortran) for such
things like memory requirement and related performance issues.
Willy.

Been there, done that. No satisfaction. Problem is with MS Visual
Studio, not Fortran, per se. I have VC++ as it comes with the package.

Also have MSDN copies of Visual Studio 6.0, same slowness there.

I would appear I need to go to Visual Studio.NET, Intel Fortran 8.1
Compiler, new GUI library, etc. Or reformat my hard drive and install
Win 98 SE?

Charles.

 

[Willy Denoyette [MVP]]

Loading 750 MB of source code files when you only have 640 MB of TOTAL RAM
will make your system trash, that is it will constantly swap RAM memory
pages to the paging file on disk, a process which is more than thousands
time slower than direct memory access . A ten fold faster CPU will not help
you here as the whole system is IO bound. If you don't believe this, just
install 640MB RAM into your Win98 SE system, and hear your disk scream.
Second your problem is in no way related to .NET C++ the language, that's
what this NG is aiming at.

Willy.

 

[Charles]

Loading 750 MB of source code files when you only have 640 MB of TOTAL RAM
will make your system trash, that is it will constantly swap RAM memory
pages to the paging file on disk, a process which is more than thousands
time slower than direct memory access . A ten fold faster CPU will not help
you here as the whole system is IO bound. If you don't believe this, just
install 640MB RAM into your Win98 SE system, and hear your disk scream.

My Win 98 SE system has 768 Mb and it does not scream. I am only loading
the file I am editing into actual memory. Out of 81 files, only a few
(say, 8-12) are actually "active"

Second your problem is in no way related to .NET C++ the language, that's
what this NG is aiming at.

Well it is related to Visual Studio, which is presumably what you guys
are using. Maybe you can suggest a better newsgroup for my post?

Or just ignore my posts; your resposese have not been helpful anyway.

Charles.

 

[Charles]

Thanks a lot!

I did disable my anti-virus (same one on the Win 98 machine) with no
difference. I tried it again after your post to confirm.

I downloaded the Process Explorer and used that. It gives a bit more
info than the task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and I then became suspicious
of InCD by Ahead Software AG (now Nero) which is part of the DVD R/RW
drivers and allows your programs to write to the DVD.

After uninstalling that, I am now down to a 40 sec load time (still slow
by the Win 98 SE standards, but much better than 20 minutes). No other
software seems to be interfering now.

Still a 40 sec load and 20 sec edit (I am back to about the same as the
clean boot or safe boot) is not really satisfactory, it is workable for
a while.

Charles.

 

[Guest]

Make sure the hard drives on the new computer use DMA drive access instead of
PIO. Search the net to figure out how to do this. It made a tremendous
boost to disk performance when I changed this setting on my computer.