Do you have any tips to improve ReSharper and/or Visual Studio performance?

Question

I'm using visual studio 2008 and ReSharper 4 and it's kind of slow. My machine has 2 GB of RAM, dual core processor and a 7200 rpm hard disk. I know more RAM and a faster hard disk could improve performance, but do you have any tips to improve ReSharper/Visual Studio performance?

Answer 1

Turn off the annoying RSS reader

• Tools, Options, Environment, Startup

Turn off all the animations

• Tools, Options, Environment, Animate Environment Tools

Install the recent Service Pack

Clean out your WebCache

• AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache

Answer 2

Visual Studio optimisations: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8440/visual-studio-optimizations#8453

Edit: The above SO post has unfortunately been deleted.

Microsoft have provided some tips that essentially boil down to turning off features you don't need and reducing solution size by splitting up a solution into smaller self contained solutions where appropriate.

JetBrains has also provided an article that list a whole range of tweaks you can make to both Resharper settings and Visual Studio settings to improve performance.

Answer 3

Having too many projects within your solution also appears to be a factor when it comes to performance. I have no real evidence of this but from my experience, less projects equates to better performance.

If consolidating projects is not an option then create an alternate solution file so you can add only the existing projects that are relevant to the work you are doing.

Answer 4

• Disable unused extensions under "Tools - Extensions".
• Disable "Track changes" in "Tools - Options - Text Editor".
• Disable "Rich client visual experience" in the "Options - Environment".
• Disable IntelliTrace (Ultimate edition only) - in the "Tools - Options - IntelliTrace - General"
• Disable "Track Active items" - "Tools - Options - Projects and Solutions - Track Active Item in Solution Explorer".
• Disable ReSharper IntelliSense in the ReSharper options
• Disable ReSharper "Analyse errors in whole solution"
• Disable editing enhancements in ReSharper - in ReSharper options turn off all the boxes under "Options - Environment - Editor"

This is a snippet from this blog-post

Answer 5

I'm having the exact same issue, and from the JetBrains site, it looks like they sort-of know about it but aren't admitting anything. Turning off solution-wide analysis does seem to help quite a bit.