Visual Studio SharePoint Workflow Designer Surface Very Slow

Question

I was not sure whether to post this in the Visual Studio form or here but as it is related to SharePoint workflows I post it here.

In Visual Studio 2010 the response time of the designer surface when manipulating workflow activities is VERY slow.  This was the same in VS 2008 and has not improved.  My dev box has 16 GB of RAM so it is not a resource issue.

For example, setting properties on an activity, like the Task_ID field, sometimes takes 5 minutes to respond to allow binding to a member.  On an activity where lots of properties need to be set this is ridiculous amount of time wasted on something that should be smooth and easy to adjust.

Another example is just navigating around the design surface stalls and does not "flow".  It is incredibly jerky and sometimes displaces red exclamation marks on activities which then disappear.

As noted above this was an issue in VS 2008 also and has not been resolved in 2010. 

When will this issue be fixed by Microsoft?

Answer 1

Hi motionpotion,

Thanks for your post!

I am trying to involve some one familiar with this topic to do some further research.

Thanks,
Simon

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Simon Huang

TechNet Community Support

Answer 2

Thanks for replying Shimin.

Answer 3

Do you have the latest Service Pack for VS2010 installed? Is this on a VM? Does the performance issue occurs only with Workflow templates?

Answer 4

Hi Manish Joshi,

Yes.  I have the latest service pack installed for VS2010.

It is on a VM.  There is 16 GB RAM assigned to the VM.  I have checked for other performance hogs and there are none.

The workflow is not a template.  It is created from scratch as a custom sequential workflow. 

The performance issue seems to occur with large workflows.  I have over 100 activities on the designer surface.  This is not a large number in my opinion considering some workflows require this. As the the number of workflow activities on the designer surface increases the performance degrades. 

As I mentioned this was the same in VS2008 on a different physical server with a different workflow.  Scrolling about on the designer surface is jerky and takes a long time.  Updating properties on activities takes a long time for each property.

Answer 5

We will need to do thorough investigation and troubleshooting and best would would be to open a support case with us. Please visit the link below to see the various paid support options available that may better meet your needs.
 
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?id=fh;en-us;offerprophone

Answer 6

I don't think I should pay for support for an obvious bug that has been around for a long time.