Why is Visual Studio 2013 very slow?

I'm running Visual Studio 2013 Pro (RTM version) on my formatted PC (Windows 8.1 fresh install).

I don't know why, but Visual Studio 2013 Pro is very very slow! Slow for building, debugging, navigating in the IDE... my hard disk drive LED is not lighting up at all!

I'm on a little MFC (C++) project using the Boost library.

Any ideas?

It is something concerned with the graphics drivers. If you update them you will be fine.

Or you can disable the hardware graphics acceleration in Visual Studio according to these steps:

1. In Visual Studio, click "Tools", and then click "Options".

2. In the Options dialog box, navigate to the "Environment > General" section and clear the "Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance" check box. (Refer to the following screen shot for this step.)

3. Clear the "Use hardware graphics acceleration if available" check box to prevent the use of hardware graphics acceleration.

4. Select or clear the "Enable rich client visual experience" check box to make sure that rich visuals are always on or off, respectively. When this check box is selected, rich visuals are used independent of the computer environment. For example, rich visuals are used when you run Visual Studio locally on a rich client and over remote desktop.

References:

• You experience performance issues, product crashes, or rendering issues in Visual Studio 2013

Try to set Current source control plug-in to None (menu Tools → Options → Source Control), if you are using the Microsoft Git provider, which seems to slow Visual Studio 2013 down more and more the larger the repository gets.

I had the whole Dojo Toolkit framework under source control using the Microsoft Git provider, and it got to the point where there were delays from the time I hit a key to the time the glyph would appear on the screen. That bad.

When/if you need Git again, you can switch to the TortoiseGit provider or Git-Extensions, both will work without slowdown. I like Git-Extensions, personally.

I too have struggled a bit with bad performance in Visual Studio 2013 (Premium). Pretty much the same issues as TS had. Slow navigation, scrolling, building... just about everything. Luckily I have manage to solve my own problem by disabling Synchronized Settings in Visual Studio. Go to menu Tools → Options → Environment-Synchronized Settings and remove this option by unchecking the checkbox.

In the case of web applications, another cause of slow building and debugging (but not IDE navigation) could be the Browser Link feature.

I found that with this switched on, building would take 4 times longer and debugging was painful - after every postback, web pages would freeze for a few seconds before you could interact with them.

I was using a solution upgraded from Visual Studio 2012. Visual Studio 2013 also upgraded the .suo file. Deleting the solution's .suo file (it's next to the .sln file), closing and re-opening Visual Studio fixed the problem for me. My .suo file went from 91KB to 27KB.

I had the same problem and the only solution that worked for me was to follow the three steps presented below:

1. Clean the WebSiteCache folder (you may find it at C:\Users%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache)

2. Clean the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" folder (find it at C:\Users%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files)

3. Restart Visual Studio

What fixed it for me was disabling Git by setting Current source control plug-in to None in Visual Studio, menu Options → Source Control:

This issue seems to be because of uninstalling the SQL Server Compact edition (4.0).

I was having this issue, and it got fixed after installing the SQL Server Compact edition 4.0. On closing Visual Studio 2013, I was getting a message to install SQL Server Compact edition as a C++ project needed some thing... can't put finger on anything.

Resolve this issue by installing Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0

Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0

I can advise an option like this.

CodeLens can be disabled like as at the picture. It gives a lot of performance goodness.

If you are debugging an ASP.NET website using Internet Explorer 10 (and later), make sure to turn off your Internet Explorer 'LastPass' password manager plugin. LastPass will bring your debugging sessions to a crawl and significantly reduce your capacity for patience!

I submitted a support ticket to Lastpass about this and they acknowledged the issue without any intention to fix it, merely saying: "LastPass is not compatible with Visual Studio 2013".

I had the same problem and all the solutions mentioned here didn't work out for me.

After uninstalling the "Productivity Power Tools 2013" extension, the performance was back to normal.

One more thing to check; for me it was Fusion logging.

I'd turned this on a very long time ago and more or less forgotten about it. Getting rid of the 5000+ directories and 1 GB of logged files worked wonders.

There is a good workaround for this solution if you are experiencing slowness in rendering the .cs files and .cshtml files.

Just close all the files opened so that the cache gets cleared and open the required files again.

Visual Studio Community Edition was slow switching between files or opening new files. Everything else (for example, menu items) was otherwise normal.

I tried all the suggestions in the previous answers first and none worked. I then noticed it was occurring only on an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application, so I added a new ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application, and this was fast.

After much trial and error, I discovered the difference was packages.config - If I put the Microsoft references at the top of the file this made everything snappy again.

Move the Microsoft* entries to the top.

It appears you don’t need to move them all - moving say <package id="Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure" has an noticeable effect on my machine.

As an aside

• Removing all contents of the file makes it another notch faster too*
• Excluding packages.config from Visual Studio does not fix the issue
• A friend using Visual Studio 2013 Premium noticed no difference in either of these cases (both were fast)

UPDATE

It appears missing or incomplete NuGet packages locally are the cause. I opened the Package manager and got a warning 'Some NuGet packages are missing from this solution' and choose to Restore them and this sped things up. However I don’t like this as in my repository I only add the actual items required for compilation as I don’t want to bloat my repository, so in the end I just removed the packages.config.

This solution may not suit your needs as I prefer to use NuGet to fetch the packages, not handle updates to packages, so this will break this if you use it for that purpose.

For me, the problem was the Start page -- it was downloading content and causing Visual Studio to hang.

The only solution for me was to:

1. Kill the DevEnv process from Task Manager
2. Start Visual Studio in Safe Mode from the command line:
   devenv.exe /safemode
3. Go to menu Tools → Options, and select the Environment/Startup options
4. Choose "Show empty environment" for the startup action
5. Close Visual Studio
6. Restart normally

Running unit tests was slow. It was a ReSharper issue.

1. Menu ReSharper → Options → Environment → General ... Clear Caches
2. Menu Tools → Options → ReSharper → General ... Suspend Now
3. Close Visual Studio
4. Delete the .suo file.
5. Open Visual Studio again.
6. Re-enable ReSharper.

I also had an issue with a slow IDE.

In my case I installed

• ReSharper
• Npgsql (low chance to cause the problem)
• Entity Framework Power Tools Beta 4

The following helped me a bit:

• Disabled synchronization - menu Tools → Options → Environment-Synchronized Settings
• Disabled plug-in selection - menu Tools → Studio → Options → Source Control.
• Disabled Entity Framework Power Tools Beta 4 - menu Tools → Extensions and Updates

Uninstalled JetBrain's Resharper - WOW!! I am fast again!!

Change the Fusion Log Value to 0. It solved my issue.

This is the FusionLog key in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion
Check ForceLog value (1 enabled, 0 disabled).

I was also facing this issue for quite long time. Below are the steps that I perform, and it works for me always:

• Deleting the solution's .suo file.
• Deleting the Temporary ASP.NET Files (You can find it at find it at %WINDOW%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\Temporary ASP.NET Files)
• Deleting all breakpoints in the application.

Visual Studio 2013 has a package server running, and it was spending up to 2 million K of memory.

I put it to low priority and affinity with only one CPU, and Visual Studio ran much more smoothly.

Performance Explorer

Have you been using menu Analyze → Performance and Diagnostics? I have! It's awesome! But you may want to clean up.

Open the Performance Explorer. If you collapse all of the items in there, select all, then you can right click and do Delete.

My solution opens faster and is in general running much faster now.

Also you may notice changes to your sln file as shown. For me, this section was deleted from the sln.

GlobalSection(Performance) = preSolution
	HasPerformanceSessions = true
EndGlobalSection

In Visual Studio 2015 Community edition, I've experienced a very (very) slow IDE after changing the "Environment Font" on menu Tools → Options... → Fonts and Colors.

Reverting this options back to the default value ("automatic") solved it immediately.

I had similar problems when moving from Visual Studio 2012 → Visual Studio 2013. The IDE would lock up after almost every click or save, and building would take several times longer. None of the solutions listed here helped.

What finally did help was moving my projects to a local drive. Visual Studio 2012 had no problems storing my projects on a network share, but Visual Studio 2013 for some reason couldn't handle it.

I had a Visual Studio 2013 installed, and it was running smoothly. At some point it started to get sluggish and decided to install Visual Studio 2015. After install, nothing changed and both versions were building the solution very slow (around 10 minutes for 18 projects in solution).

Then I have started thinking of recently installed extensions - the most recent installed was PHP tools for Visual Studio (had it on Visual Studio 2013 only). I am not sure how can an extension affect other versions of Visual Studio, but uninstalling it helped me to solve the problem.

I hope this will help others to realize that it is not always Visual Studio's fault.

I added "devenv.exe" as an exclusion to Windows Defender. This solved my problem completely. People can try this as their first try.

I have the same problem, but it just gets slow when trying to stop debugging in Visual Studio 2013, and I try this:

• Close Visual Studio, then
• Find the work project folder
• Delete .suo file
• Delete /obj folder
• Open Visual Studio
• Rebuild

None of the suggestions worked for me, but I did solve my problem. I had tried most of the other recommendations before coming to the following solution.

My Scenario/Problem:

Using Visual Studio 2017 with ReSharper Ultimate. Keyboard input in the IDE got super slow as others have described. The last change I made to my solution was to add a new web site project, so I looked into that. After trying a lot of things, I tried adding a second web site project, so I could try to replace the first one, and Visual Studio just tanked after that. It wouldn't even load the solution anymore.

My Solution:

I forced Visual Studio closed and then I removed the newly added web site project(s) from the .sln file using Notepad. After saving and starting Visual Studio, my solution loaded quickly and everything seemed to be back to normal. I added a new Web Site with a slightly different configuration (see the thinking below), and the problem did not present itself again.

My Thinking:

I think the problem stemmed from creating the new web site project and using a file system path to a network share that is hosted in Azure. I'm working over VPN which tends to slow things down, and I occasionally experience various routing problems with some services, so my problem/solution might be a bit of a snowflake. I changed the file system path to be a local repository and will publish the files as needed which seems like a much better way to go.

I had a Visual Studio behavior where the typing was slow for my HTML files. Previously when I installed, I guessed that because my HTML files were generic HTML that the need to install any web development tools from the workload component of the installer was unnecessary. I went back and installed this bit and Visual Studio behavior became as I expected it.

This already has a bunch of answers here, but a general way to easily boost Visual Studio is to clear your temp files.

Press the Windows Key and R, and enter 'temp'. Press enter, and provide any administrator permission if you need to. Then press Control A to select all, and hit the Del key. Remember to provide any administrator permissions, and if 'the item is already in use' then just press skip.

After this, Press Windows Key and R again, but this time type '%temp%'. Repeat the previous steps in the new directory.

Finally, empty the recycle bin.

This might not help a ton, but it should boost general performance.

Did anybody find CodeLens (the reference counter) problems with startup performance?

Disable CodeLens (menu Tools → Options → text editor → All languages → CodeLens)

Disable Git Source Control too (menu Tools* → Options → Source control)

Mike Flynn's version did not work for me. Renaming C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Git.Provider.dll worked for me.