Why is VS taking up nearly a GIG of RAM? What can I do to reduce.

Question

Performance of VS has been horrible since installing SP1 for 2008, it was never great on this machine, but now it's unbearable.   I typically waiting 10 minutes for the hard drive to stop spinning and the processor to stop.   The memory usage is at 920,792K.   I've had several HRESULT Visual Studio error and 'Out of Memory' exceptions.   I suspect it's this new C# pre-compiler since this is a large solution (13 project, maybe 800 classes + DB project).

Is there a way to turn the pre-compiler off or other 'back-ground' things Visual Studio is doing that is killing my machine???

My version of Visual Studio is Visual Studio Team System 2008 Version 9.0.30729.1 SP

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi brjo100

Does this problem happen to all the projects, a single devenv.exe(VS process) occupy 1G memory?
What about other program on the machine?
How much free space is there in system drive?

There are some general tips for troubleshooting, you can check here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/0376db8f-4761-4ae5-9af2-98c53216318a#VS_IDE_unexpected_problems :

a)     Try to run devenv /ResetSettings (in command prompt) to eliminate the related potential settings problem.

b)     Try disabling Add-ins (e.g. “Tools” | “Add-in Manager”) or run “devenv.exe /SafeMode”.This can eliminate the possibility that third party Add-ins or packages are causing problems. (For more detailed VS command line switches information, see: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xee0c8y7.aspx )

c)     Try creating a new project. Sometimes corrupted project settings can cause problems. These are project specific.

d)     Try to reboot the operating system to safe mode. This can help to isolate whether any other applications are interfering with Visual Studio. Note that some features (like IIS) are not available under safe mode. Please check whether this can be applied or not. In addition to safe mode, we can also try “clean boot”: How to configure Windows XP to start in a "clean boot" state http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310353 .

e)      Try to create a new user account. This can help isolate user profile corruption related causes.


If the problem persists, please let me know.

Thanks.

Figo Fei

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Answer 2

Ended up being an add-in.   Once I disabled things went back to normal.

Thanks!