Why is VS 2013 very slow?

Question

I'm running Visual Studio 2013 Pro (RTM version) on my formated PC (Windows 8.1 fresh install).

I don't know why but Visual Studio 2013 Pro is very very slow! Slow for building, debugging, navigating in the IDE... my HDD led is not lighting up at all!

I'm on a little MFC (C++) project using the Boost library.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

One more thing to check; for me it was Fusion logging. I'd turned this on a very long time ago and more or less forgotten about it. Getting rid of the 5000+ directories and 1GB of logged files worked wonders.

Answer 2

This issue seems to be because of uninstalling the SQL Server Compact edition (4.0). I was having this issue and it got fixed after installing the SQL Server Compact edition 4.0. On closing VS 2013 I was getting message to install SQL Server Compact edition as C++ project needed some thing.. can't put finger on anything.

Answer 3

Performance Explorer

Have you been using ANALYIZE > Performance and Diagnostics? I have! It's awesome! But you may want to clean up.

Open the Performance Explorer. If you collapse all of the items in there, select all, then you can right click and do Delete.

My solution opens faster and is in general running much faster now.

Also you may notice changes to your sln file as shown. For me, this section was deleted from the sln.

GlobalSection(Performance) = preSolution
    HasPerformanceSessions = true
EndGlobalSection

Answer 4

I can advise an option like this.

The "Code Lens" can be disabled like as at the picture. It gives a lot of performance goodness.

Answer 5

I too have struggled a bit with bad performance in VS 2013 (Premium). Pretty much the same issues as TS had. Slow navigation, scrolling, building.. just about everything. Luckily I have manage to solve my own problem by disabling Synchronized Settings in VS. Go to Tools -> Options -> Environment-Synchronized Settings and remove this option by unchecking the checkbox.

Hopefully this will solve your performance issues too!

Answer 6

Had a VS2013 installed and it was running smoothly. At some point it started to get sluggish and decided to install VS2015. After install nothing changed and both versions were building the solution very slow (around 10 minutes for 18 projects in solution).

Then I have started thinking of recently installed extensions - the most recent installed was PHP tools for visual studio (had it on VS2013 only). Not sure how can extension affect other version of VS, but uninstalling it helped me to solve the problem.

Hope this will help others to realize that it is not always VS fault.