How is Visual Studio 2010 performance compared to 2008?

Question

Thinking about installing Visual Studio on my Asus eee 1000HE. Since it is not a very powerful machine, I am wondering if I should install 2008 or the new 2010. Looks like there has been a lot of changes done to the UI, etc. Does that mean that it now runs smoother as well? Or is it actually heavier to run?

Answer 1

Considering that VS2010 is currently only available as a CTP release, I'd install VS2008.

Once VS2010 is fully released, without debug information and with optimizations enabled, ask this question and consider using it. For the moment, if you have 2008, use it. I doubt 2010 will be faster on your 'slow' hardware.

Answer 2

2010 is much slower on older machines in my opinion. I am running it currently on a Dell 700m with 512MB of RAM and while it does run, it feels sluggish and significantly slower than Visual Studio 2008. (Remember that it is a beta though, I am sure that performance tweaks are forthcoming)

Answer 3

It is a little bit more difficult to judge the performance differences since you are running it in a virtual machine at this time (no stand alone beta out yet).

Edit: If I am incorrect on the inability to run it outside of a virtual machine I apologize and stand corrected.

Answer 4

Does that mean that it now runs smoother as well? Or is it actually heavier to run?

This is an old post, I know, but I just had to chime in and laugh: lol

I had a pretty decent overclocked Wolfdale-based machine I built for gaming. Fast enough for virtually everything I need to do on a computer, except for editing text files in Visual Studio 2010. Just scrolling up and down in a C# file maxed out one of my cores. No joke.

So I upgraded to the new Sandy Bridge 32nm CPUs (3.3GHz, unlocked model) in an enthusiast motherboard, with 8GB of Corsair RAM, and scrolling moving the cursor around in a text buffer in VS2010 is using 30% of the CPU (that's right, it's using multiple cores). This is with no plugins and outlining turned off.

Vim in the same file, doing pretty much anything I can think of, shows 0% CPU usage, always.

VS2010's editor performance is absolutely shameful. There's no other word for it.