VS 2008: Solution opening very slow (but varies)

Question

Weare experiencing really slow opening times of solutions in Source Control Explorer. We are using: TFS 2008 Visual Studio 2008 with SP 1.

On a freshly installed machine the loadings were pretty okay (~2mins, its a large solution).

After 2 days, while not really installing anything more it increased to 12 mins. We suspect this is caused by an update to VS, IE or SQL server management. Only Windows updates were installed in this time.

Opening time went up to nearly 20 minutes, other developers are experiencing times greater than an hour.

I tried a lot of options (disabling intellisense, deleting .suo for example and some settings in IE(Checking Certificates).

I just tried it again after a few hours of searching without really changing anything, it only took two minutes again. Tried it a few times, always less than 2 minutes. Locked my system, went away for some time, came back, time to open greater than eight minutes again...

I analyzed VS behaviour with the built-in log (it has a gap between to functions)

<entry>
<record>75</record>
<time>2014/03/24 08:20:14.743</time>
<type>Information</type>
<source>Microsoft Visual Studio</source>
<description>End package load [Windows Forms Designer Resources Package]</description>
<guid>{7B5D447B-0B12-41EA-A84E-C822034422D4}</guid>
<record>76</record>
<time>2014/03/24 08:35:19.585</time>
<type>Information</type>
<source>Microsoft Visual Studio</source>
<description>Entering function CVsPackageInfo::HrInstantiatePackage</description>
<guid>{C9DD4A57-47FB-11D2-83E7-00C04F9902C1}</guid>

In ProcMon I can see a lot of File Read/Query/Close going on during the gap, each file at least ten times.

While doing a ProcMon log during a fast opening, there werent really less file or registry operations. For example file operation comparison slow vs fast: Total Events: 19235 vs 17419 File Time: 35.230 vs 6.229 (not sure about ProcMons unit here)

but in the procmon log of the really fast solution opening there arent really less operations (~88% of the slow run) while the displayed time in the fast run was like ~10% of the slow run..

Any suggestions what could have caused the short window of fast loading times and how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

This microsoft article fixed the problem.

We are using the supplied command in a bat, which is run on a schedule.

This time as answer. :p