Tweaking the environment to speed up Visual Studio

Published in

Burak Tasci

5 min readMar 9, 2017

Every developer’s dream is to work on an environment capable of responding the commands, compiling and debugging in alignment with the developer’s speed of thought.

Although such computers and development tools do not exist on the market yet, there’re a few tricks that could boost Visual Studio performance and responsiveness, reduce the time spent for builds, and increase overall productivity and efficiency.

SSD Upgrade

First of all, upgrade to SSD drives if you’re still using those old-fashioned spinning-disk drives. It will help improving overall productivity more than any other upgrade to your hardware — as spinning HDDs are the main bottleneck for overall system performance.

Configuring Windows Defender

The second step is to tweak the Windows Defender (aka Antimalware Service Executable at the Task Manager), which causes the builds take excruciatingly long time to complete.

To test the issue on your computer, simply launch a Task Manager and watch it while Visual Studio rebuilds the solution.

Notice that Windows Defender is consuming more or less the same amount of CPU time as Visual Studio, causing your builds taking more time than it absolutely has to.

Turning off Real-time protection from the Windows Defender settings could give you an overview about potential performance gains. However, turning it off would not be a permanent solution, because the Antimalware Service turns itself on automatically after a while — to ensure the system is protected.

Exclude Visual Studio and other tools from Windows Defender

The only way to solve this issue is to configure Windows Defender by excluding the Visual Studio (devenv.exe), MSBuild, and other processes (dotnet.exe, node.exe, etc), project & cache folders (npm/nuget/resharper, etc.).

There’s a list of exclusions below for a system with Visual Studio 2017 Professional, ReSharper and Node.js installed.

Excluded processes

// visual studio & tools
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe
C:\Program Files\dotnet\dotnet.exe// Node.js
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Web\External\node.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\ServiceHub\Hosts\ServiceHub.Host.Node.x86\ServiceHub.Host.Node.x86.exe// Node.js (if installed separately or upgraded)
C:\Program Files\nodejs\node.exe

Excluded folders

// project folder (whole drive is assigned for projects)
D:\// visual studio & tools
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio
C:\Windows\assembly
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild
C:\Program Files\dotnet
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office// cache folders
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\VisualStudio\Packages
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\NuGetPackages
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files
C:\Users\{{USERNAME}}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio
C:\Users\{{USERNAME}}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache
C:\Users\{{USERNAME}}\AppData\Local\Jetbrains
C:\Users\{{USERNAME}}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio
C:\Users\{{USERNAME}}\AppData\Roaming\JetBrains
C:\Users\{{USERNAME}}\AppData\Roaming\npm
C:\Users\{{USERNAME}}\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache

Turning off Indexing

It’s a common practice for developers to keep a flat folder structure and store related files near each other in an intuitive location, so they tend to know where all the files are and rarely perform a file search.

Indexing Service is another essential bottleneck for the development environment, pulling the disk I/O to 100% during builds and installing packages (i.e. NuGet, npm, bower )— as well as shortening the lifetime of SSD drives.

The solution is easy, and direct: getting rid of Indexing Service completely.

Please note that, it’s STILL possible to search for files on the computer, even though the Indexing Service is turned off: it will just search without index.

Simply, open the command prompt, type services.msc, and press enter. At the list of services, scroll down until you find Windows Search service. You’ll notice it has probably a Started status and Automatic startup type.

Go to the properties of Windows Search service, stop the service and set the startup type to Disabled. And finally, make a system restart.

Visual Studio settings

The last step is to configure the Visual Studio (in this article, the settings apply to Visual Studio 2017 Professional) and disable resource-killing features on the environment. Below is a list of recommended settings to improve UI responsiveness and environment performance, based on best practices.

Environment -> General

Uncheck “Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance”
Uncheck “Enable rich client visual experience”
Check “Use hardware graphics acceleration if available”

Environment -> AutoRecover

Uncheck “Save AutoRecover information every”

Environment -> Documents

Check “Save documents as Unicode when data cannot be saved in codepage”

Environment -> Keyboard

Set “ForceGC” to ctrl+num1
Set “ReSharper_Toggle” to ctrl+num0 (if ReSharper is used)
Set “ReSharper_EnableDaemon” to ctrl+num8 (if ReSharper is used)

Environment -> Startup

Set “At startup” to “Show empty environment at startup”
Uncheck “Download content every”

Environment -> Synchronized settings

Uncheck “Synchronize settings across devices when signed into Visual Studio”

Projects and Solutions

Uncheck “Track active item in solution explorer”
Check “Lightweight solution load for all solutions”

Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run

Check “Only build startup projects and dependencies on run”

Projects and Solutions -> Web Package Management

Set “Restore on Project Open” to false (for Bower)
Set “Restore on Save” to false (for Bower)
Set “Restore on Project Open” to false (for NPM)
Set “Restore on Save” to false (for NPM)

Text Editor -> General

Uncheck “Track changes”

Text Editor -> All Languages -> General

Uncheck “Enable virtual space”
check “Line numbers”
Uncheck “Navigation bar”

Text Editor -> All Languages -> Scroll Bars

Uncheck “Show annotations over vertical scroll bar”

Text Editor -> All Languages -> CodeLens

Uncheck “Enable CodeLens”

Text Editor -> Basic -> Advanced

Uncheck “Enable full solution analysis”

Text Editor -> C# -> Advanced

Uncheck “Enable full solution analysis”

Text Editor -> Basic, C# -> IntelliSense

Uncheck “Show completion list after a character is deleted”
Set “Snippets behavior” to “Never include snippets”

Text Editor -> CoffeeScript -> CoffeeLint

Set “Enable CoffeeLint” to false

Text Editor -> CSS -> CssLint

Set “Enable CSS Lint” to false

Text Editor -> CSS, HTML, JSON, LESS, SCSS -> Advanced

Set “Show errors as warnings” false

Text Editor -> JavaScript/TypeScript -> EsLint

Set “Enable ESLint” to false

Text Editor -> SQL Server Tools, U-SQL -> Intellisense

Uncheck “Enable Intellisense”

Text Editor -> [Language] -> Formatting -> General

Uncheck everything (if ReSharper is used for formatting assistance)

Debugging

Uncheck “Suppress JIT optimization on module load (Managed only)”
Uncheck “Enable Edit and Continue”

Debugging -> Just-In-Time

Uncheck “Script”

IntelliTrace

Uncheck “Enable IntelliTrace”

Node.js Tools

Set “Check for surveys/news” to “Never”

Web Forms Designer

Uncheck “Enable Web Forms Designer”

Windows Forms Designer

Set “Automatically Populate Toolbox” to false

XAML Designer

Uncheck “Enable XAML Designer”

Further methods

Tips and tricks explained above would definitely help to gain a significant performance boost. However, there’re a few more things to do, helping the development environment to make the builds as quickly as possible.

Disabling extensions such as Microsoft Office 365 API Tools, TypeScript for Microsoft Visual Studio (better stick to npm, gulp/webpack)
Using Visual Studio in safe mode
Using a RAM disk for the source files
Changing the “Copy local” property of reference assemblies to “false”, according to the dependency tree
Configuring ReSharper for optimized performance (could be a topic of another article)

Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments, highly appreciated!

Burak Tasci (fulls1z3)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/buraktasci
http://stackoverflow.com/users/7047325/burak-tasci
https://github.com/fulls1z3