Running Visual Studio in multiple cores

Question

I'm coding in Visual Studio 2012 and my processor has 4 cores.

Sometimes Visual Studio freezes and I take a look at Task manager, and devenv.exe process is 25% at top (one core).

I'm not sure if it's because I have too many plugins enabled, large project or just my current config isn't bearing Visual Studio with all applications opened. (Windows 7 / AMD X4 640 w/ Chrome, MSSMS, Skype, Outlook...). But, I would like to run Visual Studio with other cores to deal with it..

Is there a way to run Visual Studio using all cores while I'm working in?

(Note that I'm not asking for multi-core builds - as many questions around).

Answer 1

First of all, that sounds like devenv.exe is maxing out one of your cores. It's very hard to say what the cause of your specific problem is, but if like you said you do have numerous plugins running, disabling them and then reenabling them one at a time would no doubt help find out if they are the cause or not.

As for your main question, one would think that the designers of Visual Studio did their best to take full advantage of available CPU resources and it is unlikely that there is a separate setting to enable some kind of special multicore mode.

Answer 2

Check the CPU affinity in the Task Manager. It might be set to only one core.