Oftentimes when building a large solution with many projects in Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7 Resource Monitor will show that devenv.exe as Not Responding, however Average CPU reads a low number like 0.91 like shown:
and this is on Windows 7 x64 with a AMD Phenom II 920 4-core CPU, 8 GB RAM. Visual Studio is not responding, yet it hardly seems to be using any CPU resources.
When I tried running the build with msbuild.exe and the switch “/maxcpucount:4“, the Average CPU value still stays low, and the RHS graphs never show a value above 5-10%.
Why doesn’t Visual Studio 2010 (or msbuild) seem to be taking advantage of the CPU(s) during a build?
Building a project potentially involves a lot of disk I/O. This can take a fair bit of time, but will not produce much in the way of CPU load.
As for why it shows as not responding, my guess would be that the build process is for some reason (as in, someone did a poor job of implementing it) blocking the application from responding to requests from the OS. An application doesn’t need to reach 100% CPU utilization to be considered “Not Responding”, it just needs to get its main thread stuck somewhere that prevents it from responding to the OS in a timely fashion.