Visual Studio 2005 Memory Usage

Question

I find that quite often Visual Studio memory usage will average ~150-300 MB of RAM.

As a developer who very often needs to run with multiple instances of Visual Studio open, are there any performance tricks to optimize the amount of memory that VS uses?

I am running VS 2005 with one add-in (TFS)

Answer 1

Upgrade to a 64-bit OS. My instances of VS were taking ~700MB each (very large solutions).. and you rapidly run out of room with that.

Everyone on my team that has switched to 64-bit (and 8GB RAM) has wondered why they didn't do it sooner.

Answer 2

The number 1 thing you can do is switch to Windows 8.

It uses memory sharing / combining if the same DLL or memory page is loaded into multiple processes. Obviously there's a lot of overlap when running two instances of VS.

As you can see I've got 4 Visual studios running and the shared memory column (you need to enable this column for it to be visible) shows how much memory is being shared.

So in Windows 7 this would use 2454MB but I'm saving 600+MB that are shared with the other devenv processes.

Chrome too has a lot of savings (because each browser tab is a new process). So overall I've still got 2GB free where I'd normally be maxed out.

Answer 3

From this blog post:

[...]
These changes are all available from the Options dialog (Tools –> Options):

Environment

• General:
  • Disable “Animate environment tools”
• Documents:
  • Disable “Detect when file is changed outside the environment”
• Keyboard:
  • Remove the F1 key from the Help.F1Help command
• Help\Online:
  • Set “When loading Help content” to “Try local first, then online” or “Try local only, not online”
• Startup:
  • Change the “At startup” option to “Show empty environment”

Projects and Solutions

• General:
  • Disable “Track Active Item in Solution Explorer”

Text Editor

• General (for each language you want):
  • Disable “Navigation bar” (this is the toolbar that shows the objects and procedures drop down lists allowing you to choose a particular object in your code.
  • Disable “Track changes”

Windows Forms Designer

• General:
  • Set “AutotoolboxPopulate” to false.
  • Set “EnableRefactoringOnRename” to false.

Answer 4

minimize and re-maximize the main vs window to get vs to release the memory.

Answer 5

By uninstalling (and re-installing) Visual Assist the problem got solved for me.