Slow debugging issue in Visual Studio

In my Visual Studio instance, even if I just wrote a single line of return in a C# console application, it will take me a minute after pressing F5 to execute the actual code (I mean the time it takes to stop on the single return statement after pressing F5 -- I set a breakpoint on the return statement in the main function). What is wrong? Is there a check list?

I am using Visual Studio 2008 VSTS edition and debugging on Windows Server 2003 x64.

You may need to delete all your breakpoints---note that you need to click the "Delete all breakpoints" button (or use Ctrl + Shift + F9), NOT just delete them one by one. If Visual Studio has mangled your solution settings the latter will not work. You may need to add a breakpoint first, in order for this to work (clever, eh?).

If worst comes to worst, you may need to delete your .suo file and let Visual Studio start a new one from scratch. Note that you will lose your personal solution configuration settings, however (only for this solution, not any others). However, you may want to move/rename the file temporarily until you determine whether or not this is the problem; that way, you can always move it back. I have seen some online resources recommend deleting (moving/renaming) the .ncb file as well.

I have seen this before. Try deleting all your breakpoints and then set the ones you want. Hit F5. Is it faster now?

I just noticed that you mentioned setting up the .NET source debugging feature. Try to disable that. Your network connectivity to Microsoft's source server may be slow. Also disable any symbol server connectivity in menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols.

Also try disabling "Enable property evaluation and other implicit function calls" in menu Tools → Options → Debugging → General.

Or remove your .suo file which can be found next to your solution (.sln) file. This solved an issue I had with debug sessions taking a long time to start and stop.

I had this problem. After trying all the listed advice and removing all Visual Studio extensions, we finally figured out that somehow IntelliTrace was enabled. Disabling that fixed everything.

How to: Enable and Disable IntelliTrace

Do you have a lot of breakpoints set? Those can really slow down startup time. Everytime a new module is loaded into the process address space, they all need to be checked to see if they are valid.

Go to menu Tools → Options → Debugger → Symbols and check if you have public symbols set or UNC network paths set. Also check menu Tools* → Options → Debugger → General to see if you have source server set.

All of these can affect debugging based on slow network speed or unavailable servers. The 5 minute wait time is network timeouts.

If nothing in options is set, check to see if you have the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable set.

My colleague had a very slowly responding Visual Studio, and it literally took minutes to perform a step while debugging.

The root cause turned out to be an anti virus program (Threatfire) that went crazy while Visual Studio was running. Killing its process immediately fixed everything.

In my case changing the debug symbol "Automatically load symbol for" option from "All modules" to "Only specified modules" solved the problem. You can change this option from menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols.

A different cause plus... How to find the problem

To me it was the option ShowOtherThreadIpMarkers. A value of 1 makes Visual Studio (2010) unbearably slow (3-5 seconds for each debug step. With a value of 0, it is fast again.

What is it that option? I have no idea. I could not find it through the Visual Studio user interface. I unchecked all possible debugging options in there and nothing worked.

So I went to Import/Export Settings and loaded my old settings I've previously saved going backward in time until Visual Studio was fast again, then compared the vssettings files..., etc., etc.

I'd like to remark that if you load the settings while you are in debug mode stopped on a breakpoint, they become effective immediately. You don't have to stop the debugger and restart.

From ScottGu's blog linked by Travis: "One other performance gotcha I've heard about recently is an issue that a few people have reported running into with the Google Toolbar add-in. For some reason this can sometimes cause long delays when attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the browser. If you are seeing long delays with your web application loading, and have the Google Toolbar (or other toolbars) installed, you might want to try uninstalling them to see if that is the cause of the issue."

Running under the debugger for me was roughly 10x slower than running without debugging.

After trying every solution suggested here, I went through every debugger setting and enabled/disabled to see if it made a difference.

For me, it turned out that disabling Suppress JIT optimization on module load in the debug settings massively improved things.

Make sure you don't have any stale network mappings to servers that no longer exist (network timeouts will kill you). Or use something like Process Monitor to see if a network (or other file error) seems to be blocking for a long time.

Are you using a symbolsServer to download symbols for Windows DLL files?

If so, disable that as it can take some time, but I wouldn't expect that to cause long delays in a basic console application.

Menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols.

I know this is an old topic, but for what it's worth...

I've found that if I've had a separate Internet Explorer window open for a long time it can take up to a minute to start debugging. Close all Internet Explorer windows and debugging starts immediately.

In my case Google Toolbar was slowing down my debugging.

gplus_notifications_gadget.html just kept going on and on overloading the debugger. I wanted to keep the Google Toolbar because I use it on a regular basis, so I just disabled the G+ notification button (the small button besides the profile button). It is happy now.

I had the same issue in Visual Studio 2010, with stepping in the code excruciatingly slow (between 3 to 10 seconds). However, none of the above settings modification did the trick.

I eventually found the ultimate solution, which would work in all of the above post issues: reset all your settings, as described here (essentially menu Tools → Import and Export Settings, Reset all settings, with saving existing settings to a file (for reverting)).

You may first want to save a particular part of your settings. For instance, I first saved my color theme (Solarized-like) and then restored it after the global reset.

For me, the setting that killed performance (Windows 8 even hanged except for mouse movement) was to uncheck "Break all processes when one process breaks" in menu Options → Debugging → General.

Just one more cause of a slow Visual Studio debugging experience...

Long time ago I enabled FusionLog to see what was causing an assembly binding problem.

Make sure you disable it after using it. Why? Because it writes a lot of logging data to the disk while enabled.

This is the FusionLog key on Window's Registry (regedit.exe):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion

Change the ForceLog, LogImmersive and LogResourseBindings values from 1 (enabled) to 0 (disabled).

I had this problem too, but it had nothing to do with breakpoints in my case. It was code shortcuts that I added in the tasks window:

http://www.customsoftwareframeworks.com/blog/longwaittimetoinsertoraddalineoftextbuginvisualstudio--tasklistwindow--onlywhenaddingandremovelines

I'm sure there are other ways you could see a problem like this, but there is a bug somewhere that caused this problem for me...deleting all my options would have fixed this, but that is something that I did not want to do. So, I debugged it and wrote about it in my blog...your problem sounds like mine.

Something that has worked for me is to make sure there are no conditional break points. Other than that, I have had success fixing slow debugging by simply restarting Visual Studio and only opening one instance of Visual Studio at a time.

I had a similar issue and none of the other guidance seemed to help. I had rebooted to no avail. I had removed all breakpoints, deleted the .suo file, checked that symbols weren't being loaded from external sources, and checked that no paths existed in the application that was unavailable.

Then, I thought to clean the solution. I noticed in the output window that C# IntelliSense reported an issue when cleaning:

> There was a problem reading metadata > from > '{B0C3592F-F0D1-4B79-BE20-3AD610B07C23}' > ('The system cannot find the file > specified.'). IntelliSense may not > work properly until the solution is > reloaded.

In this case, once you actually discover the error message, it tells you exactly how to resolve it. (Good job on the error text, poor job on discoverability!) I unloaded the solution's projects, then reloaded them. I was then able to successfully run clean solution. It worked, and the debugger did as well.

Closing the "Autos" window improved debugging for me in Visual Studio 2008 for a big native C++ solution.

Hiding it won't work. It needs to be closed.

I experienced the same slowdown and disconnecting from the network fixed the problem for me as some other comments and answers have stated (but of course that is not an ideal fix).

For my case this one simple change fixed my solution: In the project properties on the debug tab I disabled "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process" (I am running Visual Studio 2010).

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