Which of my Visual Studio extensions are slowing?

Question

My Visual Studio 2012 has become slow to open. In 'safe mode' it's fast again. Presumably some extensions are slowing Visual Studio. Which?

Is there an analogue of Internet Explorer's feature which shows load time for each extensions? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/07/18/how-to-make-ie-open-new-tabs-faster.aspx

What about disabling/uninstalling extensions on-by-one and testing Visual Studio performance? — Alex F, May 01 '13 at 14:41
Try binary search -- disable half of them and try it, then repeat. O(log(N)) — the_mandrill, Aug 29 '13 at 10:22

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 01 '13 at 14:47

3

You can start Visual Studio from the command line and specify the /log option to have Visual Studio write all details to the ActivityLog.xml. It's not a pretty pop-up dialig, but you can get the information you want from there.

See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/ms241272.aspx

answered May 01 '13 at 14:47

jessehouwing

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Thanks yes I see there are 'begin package load' and 'end package load' items for each extension. I'll try to pair them and subtract the timespamps. – Colonel Panic May 01 '13 at 15:09
If you could write a nice pup-up message for that, I'd love that ;)> – jessehouwing May 01 '13 at 15:10

Colonel Panic · Answer 2 · 2014-06-17T12:53:56.593

Thanks Jesse, ActivityLog.xml has the information I want. Unfortunately, it's unreadable. I wrote a Python script to extract the relevant details

import sys
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
try:
    f = open(sys.argv[1])
except IndexError:
    f = sys.stdin

soup = BeautifulSoup(f)

loads = dict()

for entry in soup.find_all('entry'):
    description = entry.find('description')
    if not (description and "package load" in description.get_text() ):
        continue

    print(entry)
    print()

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 21 '14 at 13:19

I solved my similar problem with "The Activity Log Profiler". It's just an xsl-Stylesheet for the Activity Log and shows the HotSpots and Errors in current ActivityLog.xml

https://github.com/lcorneliussen/ActivityLogProfiler

There is also a Blog-Entry about it: http://startbigthinksmall.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/activity-log-profiler-find-out-which-extension-is-slowing-down-your-visual-studio/

Which of my Visual Studio extensions are slowing?

3 Answers3