Speeding up Visual Studio 2008 with Resharper

Are there any good tips for speeding Visual Studio that are purely software based? I already have fast HDDs, a lot of RAM and a powerful CPU. Despite all this, VS2008 is slow.

I use it mainly for C# and ASP development. I am wondering if there are tweaks and settings people do to speed it up.

PS: I use resharper and I'm not wiling to give it up.

Solution 1:

Temporarily uninstall Reshaper. If this speeds things up, it is Resharper you need to focus on. If the uninstall doesn't speed things up then it is VS.

If there are no tips (e.g. disabling features) to speed up Resharper, then you need to choose speed or Resharper, and by your PS, you've already decided.

Solution 2:

As per the previous comment, here are some things you can do to speed up ReSharper:

Disable code analysis for current file

You can temporarily disable code analysis for the current file by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+8. Pressing the shortcut again will re-enable the analysis.

If you want to bind a different shortcut for this operation, look for the ReSharper_EnableDaemon command.

Tell ReSharper to skip large files

You can tell ReSharper to avoid analyzing large files by adding them to the ‘Edit Items to Skip’ list under ReSharper→Options→Code Inspection→Settings:

Note that files for which you turn off analysis with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+8 also make it into this list.

Speed up typing

If you experience slowdown while typing, you can turn off member signatures under ReSharper→Options→IntelliSense→Completion Appearance:

If this doesn’t help, switch to built-in Visual Studio IntelliSense under ReSharper→Options→IntelliSense→General:

Disable formatting

To speed up typing, you can disable auto-format options under ReSharper→Options→Editor to avoid code formatting while typing:

Speed up live templates in large files

To speed up live templates in large files, you can turn off the Reformat and Shorten References option for each necessary template:

Known Performance Problems

The following is a list of known performance problems and their corresponding solutions.

VS2010 with R# on Windows XP slowness

This known issue can be resolved by installing the Windows Automation API 3.0. For further details, see this article. Please note that this fix applies to Windows XP only – Vista and Windows 7 already have this API installed.

Scrolling editor is slow

This problem arises due to hardware-accelerated editor rendering. If you experience this, try turning off the following options under Tools→Options→Environment→General:

• Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance
• Use hardware graphics acceleration if available