Visual Studio 2010 — how to reduce its memory footprint

Question

I have a solution with just under 100 projects in it, a mix of C++ and C# (mostly C#). When working in VS2005, the working set of Visual Studio is considerably smaller than

Answer 1

A 64-bit OS should help you out a bit here, if you get more than 4GB of physical RAM. A 64-bit OS can provide 32-bit processes with a full 4 GB of virtual memory, whereas a 32-bit OS only can provide 2 or 3 gigs at best, depending on how you boot the OS.

That being said, 100 projects is a pretty fat solution file. Maybe now would be a good time to reexamine that decision...

EDIT: Running dumpbin /headers as prescribed in the article for DEVENV.EXE returns:

File Type: EXECUTABLE IMAGE

FILE HEADER VALUES
             14C machine (x86)
               4 number of sections
        4BA1FAB3 time date stamp Thu Mar 18 06:04:35 2010
               0 file pointer to symbol table
               0 number of symbols
              E0 size of optional header
             122 characteristics
                   Executable
                   Application can handle large (>2GB) addresses
                   32 bit word machine

So that would indicate that an x64 box with > 4GB of RAM will probably improve your experience. You should have up to twice as much VM available for Visual Studio under a 64-bit OS...