Visual Studio and I have a love hate relationship. I love working in it, but why does it have to hog all of my system resources? I’ve got a decent system (3GHz Pentium 4, 3 GB of RAM, etc.), but lately I’ve been running into major issues: 5 minute freeze-ups, devenv.exe using ~200 Mb of memory (which seems like a lot to me, but I found posts from other users saying that it used over 500 Mb on their systems), etc. Doing a Google search for “devenv.exe hogging resources” shows that many others are experiencing the same type of problems. The search also, unfortunately, reveals that there really isn’t a great solution for the problem. You can always disable add-ons, of course, but this doesn’t always fix the problem and sometimes just isn’t an option.
Well, I ran into an interesting and bizarre workaround: when you see that devenv.exe is getting out of control and funky minimize the Visual Studio window(s) and then restore it/them. This takes devenv.exe’s memory usage down to a more reasonable level. Watch out, though, as it will likely start to slowly creep up again.
The ultimate inefficient workaround that I’m currently implementing is downloading the next version of Visual Studio, currently codenamed “Orcas”. I’m going to run it in a virtual machine on my desktop. I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile, as it’s got a lot of features that I’m really interested in trying out, including full support for C# 3.0 and integration of the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) project, but this VS 2005 performance issue is pushing me towards this workaround a little faster than I might have gotten there otherwise.
Anyone else have tips on optimizing the Visual Studio environment?