I’ve been dealing with horribly slow performance from Visual Studio 2008 (SP1) for a few weeks now. We’re talking seriously slow performance. Like 30-40 seconds of unresponsiveness to save the solution; 20-30 seconds of unresponsiveness after compilation if there were any errors.
Today, after taking a few memory dumps to send to Microsoft, I set out to look for network references (an idea from a workmate). I didn’t find any (nor did I expect to), but I did find a 250MB (!) SUO (Solution User Options) file.
I have no idea how the SUO file got so large, but deleting completly fixed the problem. Visual Studio has returned to it’s usual speediness. I do regret, though, not making a copy of the SUO to send to Microsoft. Next time, perhaps.
Thanks for that tip! I had experienced the same sort of inexplicable slowness with loading my project recently–it was taking several minutes to open a fairly small project. Deleting my SUO fixed it.
Hey Richard, I had the same problems as you. Delete the .suo file and I’m flying now. Thanks for posting this and dare to delete the .suo file. I wouldn’t have tried that.
Thank you for this recommendation! It helps me to save a lot of time with slow VS2010 code tabs!
Deleting the .suo file isn’t a good solution, every time I delete it my project starts and stops instantly, but still, I have to reset all the project options, and then the problem still keeps on coming back!
Isn’t there a more permanant solution? Mine takes about 30 seconds to run, and 30 seconds to stop running.
@lonelycoder – Honestly, that sounds like a different problem. Try asking on stackoverflow or the visual studio forums.