Visual Studio 2017 crashes after 10-20 minutes

Question

For over a month now I've been experiencing problems with VS2017 on my home PC. I even tried submitting the feedback to Microsoft. There's more info about the problems I'm experiencing there.

The problem:

The gist of it is that VS is eating RAM like crazy. As soon as I start opening files, adding new files, using IntelliSense, building or (especially) debugging, the RAM usage skyrockets.

After that it's only a matter of time before the VS crashes and restarts without any error message. Though there are numerous error messages throughout these breif ~20min I have with each session.

Additional details I observed:

• Doesn't happen with Python projects, as these don't have to be built constantly. It might be eventually happening if you debug a lot, but I didn't have the chance to check that because most of my Python coding is debugged on an external device
• Size of the loaded solution doesn't matter;
• UWP and WPF seem to crash the most. Console Projects take longer to crash.
• Also affects .NET Core;
• It doesn't matter which version of .NET Framework I use;
• VS2015 worked perfectly, but I don't have it anymore after the format

What I already tried:

• I reinstalled VS;
• I refreshed Windows;
• I reinstalled Windows;
• I checked my drives and RAM for issues - none found;
• I switched from Community to Enterprise;
• I tried disabling extensions;
• I applied some shady hotfix I found somewhere;
• Finally, I installed Rider which seems to be the best solution as of now. It still lacks many important features, though.

Is there anything else I can do/try/check? Did anyone experience (and fix) a similar issue?

Cheers!

Answer 1

You get a System.OutOfMemoryException, this means your Visual Studio runs out of free virtual address space (4GB on 64 Bit Windows for the 32Bit Visual Studio because Visual Studio is configured to be large address aware and MS refuses to release VS as 64Bit program which would fix this issue).

To analyze the memory usage, you need to run WPRUI.exe (part of Windows Performance Toolkit (which gets installed by VS2017) for some scenarios, if not, install it on your own), select Reference Set (Note: expand the Resource Analysis entry first to see all options).

and click on Start. Capture the memory usage grow for some 100s of MB and click on Save.

Open the generated ETL with the analyzer (WPA.exe) and analyze what the process devenv.exe is doing.

Also zip the ETL + NGENPDB folder (important) as zip and attach it to your bug report so that Microsoft can analyze it.