Visual Studio 2012 RTM has MSBuild.exe in memory after close

Question

I noticed when Visual Studio 2012 RTM was closed, that many instances of MsBuild.exe are still in memory.

Why ?

Answer 1

You can turn off the parallel build feature in visual studio. How to: Set the Number of Concurrent Builds for Multiprocessor Builds

Answer 2

The MSBuild processes are kept running for a period of time (fifteen minutes, I believe) after Visual Studio is closed. This is an attempt to improve performance, the idea being that idle MSBuild processes could be reused if another build is kicked off soon and the overhead of spawning a new process can be eliminated.

You can disable this by setting an environment variable MSBUILDDISABLENODEREUSE=1 (before starting VS) or specifying /nodeReuse:false (or /nr:false) if building from the command line.

Related issues filed on MSConnect:

• MSbuild proliferate
• Ghost MSBuild.exe in VS11