I work on a rather large solution with teams across the planet. We currently have 49 large projects and a lot of dependencies.
Unfortunately, I only have 4GB of ram and frequently have a low virtual memory error. This usually happens when I begin typing. I already increased my virtual memory to 10GB but that doesn’t seem to be enough and I don’t have the drive to space to spare to make that number any bigger.
While I was hoping it was just a memory leak somewhere in Visual Studio rebooting doesn’t seem to do much help. Getting a better machine is highly unlikely and I have no desire to set precedence of spending personal funds on new equipment. I already disabled all plugins.
Aside from disabling intelisence, are there any tweaks I can perform on VS2010 ultimate to minimize crashing when working with a large large solution?
If it hurts, don’t do it. Just break your project into smaller solutions. You only need the master solution for automated builds, and even that is debatable.
Visual Studio is a 32bit application. There is no way you it is going to use more than 4GB of RAM no matter what you do.
Make sure you have all the patches applied, especially the service pack. Visual Studio 2010 RTM was really unstable, but SP 1 seems to be ok.
Keep complaining until you get a machine with 6 GB physical RAM and a fast hard drive. While VS can’t use more than 4, you still need RAM for the OS.
Make sure Intellitrace is turned off. While debugging that is a huge performance hit even if you have a small application.
Do you have static code analysis or code contracts turned on? Both of these can be memory hogs. (These days I normally run them only for Release builds.)