Question

I’ve been running VS2010 Professional for some time, and recently upgraded to Ultimate (installed on top of Professional).

Ever since, the memory usage seems a lot higher (~ 150MB in idle with no project loaded), the initial loading of the product is a lot slower, and general performance is slow.

Is there any way to finetune performance of Visual Studio? (For example, disable some functionality of it, etc)

Answer 1

Go to tools => options => And look through the addons that you may have installed. When i upgraded from Professional to Ultimate on the same machine i faced the same issue.

• I went through VS power tools and disabled features i did not use (tools=>options=>power tools)
• I went through Intellitrace and disabled it, it has two running modes, basic and advanced, former is lighter but try turning it off completely to see if that helps
• When you load VS, the home page loads the last 10 solutions/projects you worked on before. I would recommend changing that to 1-2 to begin with
• You could also disable the new and alerts on the VS 2010 home screen. This would help decrease the load time
• Go to tools and Extension manager and review your list of add ons and uninstall any that you might not need
• Another thing that i did was, by default many tool bars such as ‘Debugging’, ‘css’, etc etc get loaded when you open a project. Get rid of all the toolbars by right clicking on the toolbar space and unchecking them all, give it a clean start and add only the ones you need.
  • If nothing else helps, delete the .suo file (Which stores the default setting for the solution you are working on), might be corrupt, and start again.

You can run visual studio with the following command line switch to load devenv without any extensions devenv.exe /resetaddin http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xee0c8y7(v=VS.100).aspx

You could always look at the task manager to profile the resources being consumed. Or even better from the command line run devenv /log output.txt to log all activities performed by VS during the load, may be you would get some hints from there.

HTH
Cheers, Tarun