Question

I’ve noticed Visual Studio 2010 is a lot slower than my Visual Studio 2008 IDE, I’ve found several nice tips and optimization suggestions for VS2008, however I want to know if people have any tips for VS2010

Answer 1

Two parts to the answer:

First, I’d really appreciate if you could download this diagnostic tool to take traces. It isn’t a fix, but it’ll help us improve the product. If you send me an email (noahric at msft), I can send you instructions and find a place for you to upload these traces. Same goes for anyone else reading this question/answer; the more traces, the merrier.

Other than that, there are a few things you can try:

1. In Tools->Options->Environment->General, turn off “Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance”, and turn off the rich client visual experience.
2. You can also try turning off hardware graphics acceleration (from the same location). I’ve found plenty of cases where the performance is better with software rendering.
3. If you are working with really large solutions, try the solution load manager. It lets you disable auto-loading of projects within a solution.
4. Do you have any extensions installed? If you do, you can try disabling them.
5. Run fewer instances of VS at once. I personally run quite a few at a time, but I’ve heard plenty of reports where people run enough instances of VS to exhaust virtual memory.