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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)

Rann Lifshitz
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Ris Adams
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5 Answers5

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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.
Glorfindel
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Scott Dorman
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    Can you update the tread link still points to stackoverflow beta... I was able to get to it but would make it easier. – bytebender Jun 23 '10 at 16:41
5

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.

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

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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.

enter image description here

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.

Simon_Weaver
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  • I'll say that Win8 is more aggresive than Win7 but all modern operating systems are able to share memory from dlls. Also the "working set" is the memory in use by an application, and it will include some of the "shared memory". Upto Win7 it have really poor memory tracking. – Ismael Dec 03 '13 at 21:10
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By uninstalling (and re-installing) Visual Assist the problem got solved for me.

Mattias Marder
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