Visual Studio 2010 editor painfully slow

Posted by Daniel Gehriger on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Daniel Gehriger
Published on 2011-01-28T16:46:23Z Indexed on 2011/01/28 23:36 UTC
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I'm running out of patience with MS VisualStudio 2010: I'm working on a solution containing ~50 C++ projects. When using the editor, I experience a lag of 1 - 2 seconds whenever I move the cursor to a different line, or when I move to a different window, or generally when the editor losses and gains focus.

I went through a whole series of optimizations, to no avail:

  • installed all hotfixes for VS2010
  • disabled all add-ins and extensions
  • disabled Intellisense
  • deleted all temporary files created by VS2010
  • disabled hardware acceleration
  • unloaded all but 15 projects
  • disabled tracking changes
  • closed all but one window

and so on.

This is on a Dual Core machine with SSD harddrive (verified throughput > 100MB/s), enough free space on HD, Windows 7 Pro 32-bit with 3GB of RAM and most of it still free.

Whenever I type a letter, CPU usage of devenv.exe goes to 50 - 90% in process monitor for 1 - 2 seconds before returning to 5%.

I used Process Explorer to analyze registry and file system access, and I only notice frequent accesses to the .sln file (which is quiet small), and a few registry reads, but nothing that would raise a red flag.

I don't have this problem with solutions containing less projects, so I'm inclined to think that it's related to the number of projects. For your information, the entire solution has been migrated over the years from VS2005 to VS2008 to now VS2010.

Does anyone have any ideas what else I could do to resume work on this project, other than returning to VS2008?

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