Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load?

Our data layer project has the usual hundreds of generated files. Several months ago that was no issue, but over the last month or so things began to get slower and slower. My first attempt to get back to reasonable performance was to break the data project out of my main solution. For the last few weeks even the separate project was hard to work with. I turned off Ankh, the Subversion add-in for Visual Studio. That seemed to help a bit. I even tried turning off Norton when loading the project but was still faced with load times of 5 to 7 minutes. Performance didn’t get any better after the project was loaded. Simple click and traverse operations were painfully SLOW.

So I called for help. After trying all the Google suggestions to no avail, I emailed the Charlotte Radiology development team. Matt Duffield came through. He suggested selecting Tools / Import and Export Settings … / Reset All Settings. We’re using Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, but I would expect this fix to work most editions of the IDE.

Matt reports that he has to perform this operation every so often to keep the performance up on the IDE. We haven’t seen any side effects, but then Matt and I both favor the standard settings. It does NOT affect our add-ins.

So how much did it help? My data project was taking well over 6 minutes to load. After the fix it loads in 15 seconds. “We report, you decide.”

Bill J

posted on Saturday, August 05, 2006 8:31 AM

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# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 2/25/2007 11:05 AM Jones

Many thanks for the tip!

My copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional was starting to crawl after I had installed Ankh... resetting seems to have restored VS to its former glory.

...is there a similar tip for crawling programmers? :)

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 4/5/2007 7:57 AM Martin

I find that moving from vb6 to vs2005 is really nasty, vb6 flies where vs2005 you have to wait for EVERYTHING.

Even the compiled programs are significantly slower in operation.

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 5/8/2007 8:50 AM Richard Edwards

Thank you, thank you, thank you. VS2005 was taking about 30 seconds to load the IDE only without a project .. now it takes 3 seconds.

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 9/29/2007 5:46 AM Robertas Bastys

Thanx a lot! VS2005 opens ~15 times faster now

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 10/1/2007 4:36 PM Phil Bishop

What do you mean resetting? What did you do to fix this?

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 11/4/2007 1:46 PM Talal Hallaj

my form is slow when i change the code and alternative to form desgin.

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 11/4/2007 1:46 PM Talal Hallaj

my form is slow when i change the code and alternative to form desgin.

# Just remember.. 11/27/2007 5:36 AM S. Braathen

Nice tip, its just that now all my third party components was removed from the toolbar, ill get over it ;).

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 3/14/2008 9:37 AM mike

i was installing it for an XNA Game Studio Express, so that i could make games for my xbox 360, and it took a long to to install about 7 seconds per MB, and then it ended up failing and i had to restart. but after i restarted it loaded al the download in a few seconds, then said it was finished. SO NOW i go to open it, and it says cannot find one or more componetns please reinstall. so i go to the zip file on the cd this morning and after half an hour or more of downloading only has 20 MB and is going from 0 KB -3 -11-20-22-1- 14,/second and its driving me insane. it takes a while the first and doesnt work, and now its hardly even installing. (Visual C# 2005 Express Edition setup: also: Microsoft MSDN express edition, Microsoft SQL server 2005 Express edition x86. total: 335MB to install). help please?? to get to work.?

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 3/25/2008 6:57 AM mincey

Try downloading the ISO image and either burn it onto CD or mount the image as a virtual drive (latter requires Daemon Tools or similar)

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 3/28/2008 10:57 AM Balboos HaGadol

I have very slow loads on certain projects. It is, however, the result of the loading/refreshing of the designer window.

If the designer window in an afflicted project is closed before the project is closed, then it reopens quickly. If the designer is left open, then when the project is re-opened it adds a good part of an extra minute.

Further symtoms:
This minute is also added if the Form is modified in code (particularly when InitializeComponent() is modified - but only if one activates (displays) the designer window.

I made a digital clock control: it ticks in the designer window!

Clearly, the designer is the culprit, possibly spending a lot of it's time quitely timing-out of various events.

I realize that some 'execution' is required to render the controls, but it actually inhibits coding to an extent because of the price to be paid.

How do I stop (or at least control) this annoyance? It was visible in VS2003 and has persisted through VS2008, after conversion (both to /clr:oldsyntax and /clr).

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 5/8/2008 3:36 AM JothiMurugeswaran

I am facing the similar kind of load problem in Visual Studio 6.0. But when i disabled the Norton Service, it is getting solved.

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 5/20/2008 9:48 PM Rudy

Thank you so much for such a valuable tip. You've saved me a lot of time and aggravation.

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 5/26/2008 1:58 AM Adil

Thanks for the tip, it really made VS2005 load faster but I am having problem loading designer window. It was loading a lot faster earlier but now the designer window for an existing form is laoding very very slow. Any help will be appreciated.

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 6/7/2008 9:40 AM alok

VS can load the app very slow if you have lots of breakpoints. if you remove them then it will load very fast. but who wants to loose the breakpoints?
i found one link which provides help
http://saurabhramya.googlepages.com/save%26loadbreakpointsinvisualstudio

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 8/8/2008 2:44 AM Emanuele

Great Great Great, on my notebook with 2gb ram visual studio comes up in 2 seconds !! before it takes sometimes 4 or 5 minutes. Thank you

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 11/1/2008 3:31 AM ersin inan

Thank you soooooo much! I am pulling my hair off for a few hours to find the solution. Resetting the settings worked fine!

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 5/18/2009 8:07 AM siddhes

Hi, I am new to VS2005. my application size arround 1.5 gb , so very slow to compile and running. If I debug the application system will be hung. i am using intel 3.0 GHz processor 1 GB RAM

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 6/10/2009 12:38 AM Amit Sahai

Thanks Man.... It worked for me

# re: Is your Visual Studio 2005 SLOW to load? 8/27/2009 10:20 PM Amar

Thank you. This tip was great help. I had a solution with more than 25 projects which used to take about 4-5 mins. After resetting it opened within 10 seconds.

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Bill Jones Jr. MVP Visual Basic

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