Visual Studio Performance

I'm running Visual Studio 2008 on a old, single-core laptop with 1GB RAM.

VS is a resource hog, so it's not long before my laptop is struggling having a reasonable size solution in addition to the usual open applications.

There are a few things you can do to try and squeeze a bit more performance out of Visual Studio I've found from various blogs and looking around myself. The first two are the most useful. Don't muck with the other options unless you know what they're going to do.

Recycle Memory

Perhaps the biggest trick is the simplest: if you minimize Visual Studio, it will force a garbage collection, and packing of the memory usage. This can make VS drop from a few hundreds MB of memory usage to 20 or less. Of course things will slow down when you go back into VS as things get reloaded into memory from virtual memory and disk.

Patch to SP1

Make sure Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is installed, for the bug and performance fixes since release.

Turn off animation

Tools > Options > Environment > General and uncheck Animate environment tools.

Disable the Navigation Bar

Go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# and uncheck Navigation bar under Display.

Turn off Track Changes

Tools > Options > Text Editor and uncheck Track changes.

Turn off Track Active item

Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions: uncheck Track Active Item in Solution Explorer.

Turn off AutoToolboxPopulate.

Tools > Options > Windows Forms Designer: set AutoToolboxPopulate to False.

Startup with an empty environment

Tools > Options > At startup: Show empty content

Windows Forms refactoring

Tools > Windows Forms Designer > General: Set “EnableRefactoringOnRename” to false in the Refactoring section