CODEWITHSUNDEEP
performancevisual-studio-2010memory
Trident D'Gao
Trident D'Gao

Reputation: 19690

How to make Visual Studio 2010 use more than 600Mb of memory

I am tired of how slow the VS2010 is. I know there are a lot of topics here about tuning the settings and I've read/applied them all with not much luck though. Namely the things I've already done:

Nothing helped it is still unacceptably slow. I know what I am saying because with VS2008 I never had such problems.

Now, I am working on a quite big C# solution with about 20 projects in it. Visual Studio works quite fast when just opened, but as time goes it starts lagging and eventually gets so slow that I have to restart it. The resource monitor shows that the amount of memory consumed by it is about 200 MB in the beginning and goes up to ~600 MB and then doesn't go any higher. I have 8 GB of total RAM on a x64 laptop with about 4GB that are always free. I find it weird how little memory the VS uses and from what my common sense tells me the more memory the faster the app should work. So I believe my question is how to make the VS use more of the available memory.

PS I tried a recipe from Configure Visual Studio to use more ram Didn't work out.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1893

Answers (1)

JaredPar
JaredPar

Reputation: 754575

There is no way to make Visual Studio use more memory. The application itself has no preset limitation. It will simply use the amount of memory that is granted it by the operating system (just like other apps).

The reason you see it increase to 600MB and then stop is just a side effect of how the managed GC works. As it performs operations like displaying intellisense, performing edits, etc ... more managed objects will be created. Eventually the GC is triggered and it reclaims all of the free objects and the longer lived ones are promoted. Overall though memory usage will be lowered but not as much as before you started editing. Then you edit some more and this process continues until it reaches the appearance of a steady state. If you deeply analyze it you'll see that it's actually more of a saw tooth graph of memory usage.

As to why your particular instance of Visual Studio is slow though is hard to determine remotely. 20 projects is a larger solution but performance should still be acceptable even with that many. Couple of things to try in order to isolate the problem

  • Try editing a smaller solution. It's possible there is one project in particular which is giving VS a problem. Breaking the project down into smaller solutions could help isolate it.
  • Try disabling Aero on your computer. It's possible that WPF is a problem here

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions