Application runs very slow in debug mode

Question

My C# program should execute an asynchronous task 30 times per second.

The program performs well as a standalone windows application.

But when it runs in debug mode in Visual Studio 2013 Professional environment the perfomance is very poor - just 5 tasks per second, even if there're no breakpoints in the code whatsoever.

Is slow debugging a "feature" of the VS.Net 2013 and is there a way to debug time critical C# apps?

Answer 1

Thank You user1720293 for the idea about logging. The main reason for the huge perfomance drop was in logging to console through log4net.Appender.ConsoleAppender. After commenting out a line in the configuration file the problem has gone

  <root>
    <level value="DEBUG"/>
    <!-- here's the source of the problem
    <appender-ref ref="ConsoleAppender"/>
    -->
    <appender-ref ref="RollingFile"/>
  </root>

Answer 2

I'd try eliminating a few things by: Removing all watch items Hiding the locals, autos window etc

Are you tracing out a lot of text? You could also try not doing that and see if it makes a difference.

Is visual studio left alone by your anti-virus software?

If it isn't pure c# code and c++ is involved anywhere then debugging performance is poor.

None of this is Visual Studio 13 specific advice. Did you previously run this code ok on 2012 or 2010?