How do I disable VsHub.exe in the system tray?

Question

Starting Visual Studio 2015 also launches two other executables:

VsHub.exe

and

Microsoft.VsHub.Server.HttpHost.exe<

Answer 1

This seems to be a communication Swiss Army knife for visual studio as per @sraboy's answer. It is used during debugging to display performance information about the running process, but also to send telemetry to Microsoft about the project you're working on. You can build and step through code fine with it disabled (at first glance).

Removing, renaming or blocking the vshub process creation with AV will break the performance tracing I mentioned. Losing vshub improves privacy while using Visual Studio as it communicates with vortex.data.microsoft.com, passing information such as solution & project GUIDs along with your account id. Below is a screenshot from fiddler intercepting the HTTPS data.

Blocking access at network level helps with privacy, but it will not address your resource usage issue. I would consider the latter as a normal overhead of running Visual Studio.

For your use case, you can probably get away with some form of disabling (blocking instantiation with your antivirus software is probably the cleanest approach), but it may support additional functionality I haven't figured out yet.