Visual Studio 2015 is very slow

Question

I just finished the installation and the whole IDE is super slow. It seems like it's making some kind of heavy CPU calls in the background where the whole IDE literally freezes and becomes unresponsive for about 2-3 seconds.

I was not having this issue with Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate. I am running Visual Studio 2015 Professional.

Installed Add-Ons/Packages:

• Node.js Tools
• ReSharper

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

My Visual Studio 2015 RTM was also very slow using ReSharper 9.1.2, but it has worked fine since I upgraded to 9.1.3 (see ReSharper 9.1.3 to the Rescue). Perhaps a cue.

One more cue. A ReSharper 9.2 version was made available to:

refines integration with Visual Studio 2015 RTM, addressing issues discovered in versions 9.1.2 and 9.1.3

Answer 2

I found that the Windows Defender Antimalware is causing huge delays. Go to Update & Security -> Settings -> Windows Defender. Open the Defender and in the Settings selection, choose Exclusions and add the "devenv.exe' process. It worked for me

Answer 3

Try turning off the ReSharper Code Inspection from menu Options → Code Inspection → Setting and choosing Visual Studio IntelliSense (menu Option → Intellisense → General) instead of ReSharper IntelliSense will make it much faster.

Answer 4

Try uninstalling either Node.js Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS) or the commercial add-on called ReSharper from JetBrains. Using both NTVS and Resharper causes memory leaks in Visual Studio 2015.

NTVS = Node Tools for Visual Studio

Answer 5

I have experienced very slow edits with Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition especially while working with HTML (and Razor as well) and JavaScript. I was able to resolve the issue by removing the references in the "Scripts/_references.js" file of my ASP.NET MVC project. Furthermore, I disabled autosyncing in that file by adding this to the top of the _references.js file.

This solution causes Visual Studio's IntelliSense to not load show all the JavaScript references available. However, ReSharper's IntelliSense will work perfectly fine and fast.

/// <autosync enabled="false" />

Answer 6

If you're suffering due to ReSharper then below mentioned options may help.

Visual Studio configuration:

ReSharper may conflict with the other Visual Studio addins and extensions - in case of slowdowns, please try to disable the other addins one-by-one and check if it helps to speed up Visual Studio with ReSharper. Here are some examples of known compatibility issues with other addins:

Productivity Power Tools

VSCommands

Also, you may try turning off the following options under "Tools | Options | Environment | General": Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance Use hardware graphics acceleration if available

ReSharper configuration.

Though ReSharper provides quite a few powerful and useful features, some of them can be tweaked or turned off in terms of improving the speed. Here are some examples:

Turn off Solution Wide Analysis (SWA) in "ReSharper | Options | Code Inspection | Settings", 'Analyze errors in whole solution' checkbox

Switch back to Visual Studio IntelliSense in "ReSharper | Options | Environment | IntelliSense | General" dialog Clearing caches for current solution in "ReSharper | Options | Environment | General" dialog

Here are the links:

• Visual Studio with ReSharper is slow

• Speeding up ReSharper (and Visual Studio)

Answer 7

This seems silly but after deleting C:\Users\{User}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache everything started going fast again. If you're out of options you can try that. It's the only thing that worked for me.

Answer 8

Same issue here, Visual Studio 2015 Pro Update 2 on a brand new machine. The editor was extremely slow, typing like chewing gum.

The reason was ESET NOD32 Antivirus 9. It has a thing called "Host Intruder Prevention System (HIPS)" enabled by default. I don't know how useful it this, but it can be disabled or I just added a rule, to allow devenv.exe.

Now it's fine.

Answer 9

I had a similar problem, but only on startup;

To resolve my start issue:

I have removed extensions from Visual Studio 2012 for phones;

Repair Visual Studio 2015 same… uninstall Visual Studio 2015 (hang, not all removed)

Then use:

https://github.com/tsasioglu/Total-Uninstaller

Remove all that was possible with Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013, etc.

Install Visual Studio again error: Lookup logs, inet, etc. and found Visual C++ redist 2015. I reinstalled and repaired vc_redist.x64.exe and vc_redist.x86.exe.

I installed Visual Studio 2015 again and now I don't have any startup issues (vsHub can be uninstalled and connected services can be disabled…)

Answer 10

I had the same problem with VS 2015 Community with Node Tools.

I saw some issues about this problem in the NTVS github repository, and it may related to analysis file in the project. In fact, I have deleted this file every project load and it gets faster, but I think the safest way to improve it is ignoring some directory files like the link below.

https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejstools/wiki/Projects#ignoring-directories-for-analysis

Answer 11

It is most likely because you uninstalled some SQL Server components Visual Studio is using. Though Visual Studio still works, it's very slow.

Just go to "Programs and Features" in the Control Panel and repair Visual Studio. The needed Visual Studio components will be installed again and Visual Studio will be back as fast as before.

Answer 12

I experienced that when downgrading (i.e. uninstalling and reinstalling) from VS 2015 Ultimate to VS 2015 Professional, the IDE was very sluggish and constantly froze.

Doing a new clone of the repository, or - as one of my collegues tried - cleaning out all files not in source control (in the case of Git git clean -xfd), helped me get rid of the this problem. The IDE is now running smoothly again.

The assumption is that Ultimate leaves some files behind that cause this behaviour in Professional, but I have not been able to track down which.

Answer 13

In my case both 2015 express web and 2015 Community had memory leaks (up to 1.5 GB) froze and crashed every 5 minutes. But only in projects with Node js. what solved this issue for me was disabling the intellisense: tools--> options--> text editor-->Node.js--> intellisense-->intellisense level=No intellisense.

And somehow intellisense still works))

Answer 14

I also had this issue with Visual Studio 2015, tried everything I could read about but in the end all that was left was a clean install. I used Microsofts tool VisualStudioUninstaller to get rid of every component.

https://github.com/Microsoft/VisualStudioUninstaller

Usage:

1. Extract TotalUninstaller.zip
2. Open an administrator command prompt.
3. Execute Setup.ForcedUninstall.exe
4. Type 'Y' to uninstall.

After reinstall everything worked normally again. I did not experience lag in every project but one was causing enough pain so I really had no choice.

Read about another command that you can also try but I know VisualStudioUninstaller works, at least it did for me.

D:\vs_ultimate.exe /uninstall /force

Where D: is the location of your installation media (mounted iso, etc).

Answer 15

This might just help someone, in addition to what other answers have mentioned.

Clear the contents of AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache folder.

In my case I had VS 2015 pro update 3 and this is what helped me speed up VS.

Answer 16

This may help someone visiting this question.

I had an issue where it was slow only in very large files. When opening braces such as { or after completing a type, such as decimal it would hang.

This was resolved by disabling the "Show a completion list after every character is typed" setting in Options => Text Editor => C# => Intellisense

Answer 17

This answer might seem silly but I had my laptop's power plan set to something other than High performance (in Windows). I would constantly get out of memory warnings in Visual Studio and things would run a bit slow. After I changed the power setting to High performance, I no longer see any problem.

Answer 18

After upgrading from VS2013, I found that when debugging in Visual Studio 2015, it would freeze, I unchecked "Tools>Options>Debugging>General>Enable Diagnostics Tools while debugging" It brought debugging sessions back to normal. While Diagnostics are useful, I don't need them all the time so if at any point I need them I can turn it back on.

Answer 19

Update PC Drivers

In my case, and I had bad lag doing the simplest of things, it helped to update my pc drivers. The system drivers are the foundation for everything.

I was fortunate that I have Dell and they have awesome website support to do this. I googled

dell <my model name> update drivers

or go to the drivers home page

I let it update all the drivers it wanted to (Dell driver update is pretty much automatic).

Much of the lag seems to have gone away.