Visual Studio 2010 runs awful - can't find solution

Question

I have a problem with my Visual Studio 2010 Professional - I'm working on a project at work, and everything in VS runs slow (maybe except IntelliSense). I know that start-up times usually are quite bad, and I can live with that.

But building a medium sized solution (7 projects, a few hundred files) takes from 3 to even 10 minutes... After building the solution VS says that it's ready, but I have to wait for the localhost to respond up to 5 minutes... That's up to 15 minutes in total! To keep things short:

• after turning on everything I still have at least 1Gb of free RAM (4 total) and only 20-25% of processor usage
• I have uninstalled every plugin
• The project builds and works fine on my teammate's computer
• The project works and builds even better when I work on a server using my computer and a virtual desktop
• My computer works just fine
• I have just finished the painful re-installation of VS (after removing VS cleaning it's leftovers - or so I think)

EDIT: After cleaning up my solution my build times are blazing fast! :) Plus, I was able to find out that I have some kind of problem with my processor, which didn't show up in the process manager until now... Anyway, I think my problem has been solved somehow... THANK YOU!

Answer 1

Try to run VS in safe mode

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /SafeMode

This switch prevents all third-party VSPackages from loading when Visual Studio starts, thus ensuring stable execution.

Answer 2

If you're not doing anything and your CPU is at 20-25% usage, then there's something wrong with your PC. A modern PC doing nothing but running Windows should use 3-4%.

Answer 3

Try Visual Studio Memory Wrapper by Jetbrains. It helped me with my Visual Studio 2010 performance a lot, but it may not work in your case.

Answer 4

Try stopping all instances of the ASP.NET development server between debugs. My workstation seems to have a hard limit of 20 instances on different ports. As I type this, I have 5 rogue instances running who knows what. I manually close them, and I have warp capability again.

Answer 5

It's a fact that Visual Studio 2010 (devenv.exe process), eats a los of memory.

Sometimes when I want to fast develop a little project or just make a fast script I use Visual Studio 2008 because resouce consumption with previous version is evident.

I recommend you to unistall all the visual studio 2010 extensions if you have any and make a new Solution for your project collections if the solution you are currently using was created long time ago.

You can try also VS2012. It has become better talking about resource consumption