Visual Studio 2015 is very slow

Question

I just finished the installation and the whole IDE is super slow. It seems like it\'s making some kind of heavy CPU calls in the background where the whole IDE literally fre

Answer 1

I found that the Windows Defender Antimalware is causing huge delays. Go to Update & Security -> Settings -> Windows Defender. Open the Defender and in the Settings selection, choose Exclusions and add the "devenv.exe' process. It worked for me

Answer 2

I experienced that when downgrading (i.e. uninstalling and reinstalling) from VS 2015 Ultimate to VS 2015 Professional, the IDE was very sluggish and constantly froze.

Doing a new clone of the repository, or - as one of my collegues tried - cleaning out all files not in source control (in the case of Git git clean -xfd), helped me get rid of the this problem. The IDE is now running smoothly again.

The assumption is that Ultimate leaves some files behind that cause this behaviour in Professional, but I have not been able to track down which.

Answer 3

I also had this issue with Visual Studio 2015, tried everything I could read about but in the end all that was left was a clean install. I used Microsofts tool VisualStudioUninstaller to get rid of every component.

https://github.com/Microsoft/VisualStudioUninstaller

Usage:

1. Extract TotalUninstaller.zip
2. Open an administrator command prompt.
3. Execute Setup.ForcedUninstall.exe
4. Type 'Y' to uninstall.

After reinstall everything worked normally again. I did not experience lag in every project but one was causing enough pain so I really had no choice.

Read about another command that you can also try but I know VisualStudioUninstaller works, at least it did for me.

D:\vs_ultimate.exe /uninstall /force

Where D: is the location of your installation media (mounted iso, etc).

Answer 4

I had the same problem with VS 2015 Community with Node Tools.

I saw some issues about this problem in the NTVS github repository, and it may related to analysis file in the project. In fact, I have deleted this file every project load and it gets faster, but I think the safest way to improve it is ignoring some directory files like the link below.

https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejstools/wiki/Projects#ignoring-directories-for-analysis

Answer 5

This may help someone visiting this question.

I had an issue where it was slow only in very large files. When opening braces such as { or after completing a type, such as decimal it would hang.

This was resolved by disabling the "Show a completion list after every character is typed" setting in Options => Text Editor => C# => Intellisense

Answer 6

Try uninstalling either Node.js Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS) or the commercial add-on called ReSharper from JetBrains. Using both NTVS and Resharper causes memory leaks in Visual Studio 2015.

NTVS = Node Tools for Visual Studio