Recently I’ve been getting pretty annoyed by my Visual Studio 2008, which has been taking longer and longer to do my favorite menu item, Window > Close All Documents. Today was the last straw — I decided 20 seconds to close four C# editor windows really isn’t acceptable for a machine with four gigs of ram, and so I went to look for some fixes.

Here are some of the good ones I found that worked. Use at your own risk of course!

Disable the customer feedback component

In some scenarios Visual Studio may try to collect anonymous statistics about your code when closing a project, even if you opted out of the customer feedback program. To stop this time-consuming behaviour, find this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Packages\{2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11d2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}

and rename it to something invalid:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Packages\Disabled-{2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11d2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}

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Clear Visual Studio temp files

Deleting the contents of the following temp directories can fix a lot of performance issues with Visual Studio and web projects:

C:\Users\richardd\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache
C:\Users\richardd\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files\siteName

(source)

Clear out the project MRU list

Apparently Visual Studio sometimes accesses the files in your your recent projects list at random times, e.g. when saving a file. I have no idea why it does this, but it can have a big performance hit, especially if some are on a network share that is no longer available.

To clear your recent project list out, delete any entries from the following path in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectMRUList

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Disable AutoRecover

In nearly four years, I have never used Visual Studio’s AutoRecover feature to recover work. These days, source control and saving regularly almost entirely eliminates the need for it.

To disable it and gain some performance (particularly with large solutions), go to Tools > Options > Environment > AutoRecover and uncheck Save AutoRecovery information. (Cheers Jake for the tip)

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