Visual Studio 2008 crawling after long idle time

Question

What's up people.

Something's been bothering me for a while now... and I was wondering if any of you might know of a workaround for this.

The C# solution im working on is a huge solution that contains about 20 projects and almost the same amount of unit test projects. Each projects contains hundreds of files. So opening and closing the solution takes a while... but once it's opened, everything is fine.

But, if I leave my computer up for the night (with my solution still opened in VS) and come back the next morning, everything I'll do in VS will be very slow for the next half hour or so.

I know why this happens... it's because Windows seems to remove idle processes from memory (RAM). And when I do something in VS, it takes the data from the pagefile and puts it back in the memory which slows everything single operations I do till the process' memory has been fully restored in RAM.

So my question is, is there a way to tell Windows that VS is a high priority process/application and to leave that process' memory in RAM?

Thanks in advance,

-Oli

Answer 1

I don't think this is possible. OTOH, you could put your computer in suspend-to-disk mode. That would pretty much freeze its state as it is when you leave (that is: VS in RAM) and restore it to the same when you start working. As an additional bonus, you would help to conserve energy and thus might save the earth.

Answer 2

You could alter your VS shortcut according to this article to boost the priority, but I don't know whether it would do what you describe for the process' memory.

Also solely for performance sake you could consider getting an SSD drive to replace your hard drive, if you haven't already. A friend of mine showed me his new laptop with an SSD onboard and it booted into Windows under a minute, and opened VS in less than 5 seconds.

Granted that was opening VS straight from the start menu, opening that huge a project hopefully would at least be significantly faster.

Answer 3

AFAIK, changing the process priority won't solve the problem, as the bottleneck seems to be I/O rather than CPU time. If the problem hurts your productivity, it would be well worth it to just buy a few more Gs of RAM (how much depends on your OS and budget). If you can get about 3-4GB of RAM, you can even eliminate the swap file (or close to eliminate it). This will prevent VS from sinking when idle.

Another option would be to create a tool that will walk VS's heap, forcing it into the main memory. This can be done by writing an add-in or by code injection. Have it run before you get to work, and you'll have VS up and about once you get to it. It will, however, require some work, and you might get more than you actually need in memory (some of VS's memory is in the swap file even when you work as usual, as with every other process).