Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate slow while editing C# code

4
votes

I've checked a number of articles about disabling graphics acceleration, turning off IntelliTrace, and using Sysinternals Process Monitor (ProcMon) and am at a loss as to how to find out what is causing my editor to be ridiculously slow. ProcMon shows devenv.exe:

performing a large number of "NotifyChangeDirectory" against "C:\", "C:\Users\my_user_name" (and also some with random files from my project), and

registry operations (RegQueryKey, RegSetInfoKey, RegQueryValue, RegCloseKey) against:

  • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Cryptography\Defaults*,
  • HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\AutoRecover*,
  • HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\FileMRUList,
  • HKCR\Drive\shellex\FolderExtensions, HKCU\Software\Classes

And it also performs file open and close operations (seemingly random) against files in the project.

This happens even with a single project and one instance of Visual Studio 2012 Professional open. Anyone have any ideas?

Edit: This is on an Intel i7 machine with 16GB of RAM and an SSD. Task Manager doesn't indicate a CPU utilization, memory, or disk issue. IntelliTrace is disabled. Graphics acceleration is disabled. Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate.

Edit: Went to a new machine and it happens there, too. Now, in Visual Studio 2013.

4
visual-studio-2012visual-studio-2013
Not sure this is really a programming issue, perhaps one of the other exchange sites would be more suitable. Where are you saving your projects? - Matt
Hi Matt, I'm saving projects to a local folder on my SSD. I figured SO would be the most appropriate given that developers would be the primary audience. - joelc
Do you have the Object Browser/Class View window open while editing? These appear to be updated synchronously which makes them unusable... - Paul Michalik
I do not. The only things open are the editor window, solution explorer, properties, and output/error list. - joelc
I assume no other programs have any performance issues, and the ram and hard drive check out ok. When you say "slow" you mean the UI is slow to respond, or the editor itself has a noticeable delay between you sending a keystroke and it appearing in the window? Or are there other symptoms? - Matt

4 Answers

2
votes

It may be many other things, but in my case it was the Assembly Binding Log (Fusion logs) enabled that slow down VS.

See this answer relative to Fusion logs. VS need a restart after changes in Registry.

If it doesn't resolve your issue, I strongly suggest you to use Process Monitor to find the culprit activity. I had also a lot of AutoRecover related logs but it was not the real issue in my projects.

1
votes

Deleting the contents of "C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp", and restarting my computer sped things back up to normal for me. There were over 47,000 folders in my temp folder.

0
votes

Does the problem go away after you disable auto-recover in visual stuido?

Tools->Options->Environment->AutoRecover

0
votes

I've had very similar-sounding problems which occur immediately after I run a unit test using the Resharper Test Runner (see Resharper 8.1 Test Runner slowing down Visual Studio Text Editing).

I tried all the other options presented above (and below), to no avail. Disabling the R# test runner and restarting VS fixed it, though it's not the solution I need. Are you perhaps using Resharper too?