Do you have performance problems when you work on Visual Studio projects via a network share?

Question

We have tremendous problems with Visual Studio (2008, if that matters) locking up and slowing down when accessing projects over a network drive. It can take several minutes to open a large Web site project through a mapped drive, and saving even a single file can take a minute or more.

I fired up Wireshark and watched the traffic. VS, it seems, requests massive amounts of files from the network -- there's an enormous amount of SMB traffic. I've done some research, and this traffic seems to stem from two situations.

1. VS has to have everything in its own process to provide Intellisense.
2. VS needs to have all the source in order to compile the project.

All the advice I've read seems to boil down to the same thing: work locally, not on a remote machine, then push your code to an integration server via source control.

This would sure solve our problems (VS is quite fast working locally), but what if you can't work locally? What if the project and the infrastructure required to run it is too large and complicated to be replicated on everyone's individual machines?

We've gone 'round this problem a couple times, and the only way we can figure to work on these projects is direct access via a mapped drive. However, the VS slowness and lockups are really becoming a problem.

One solution: we installed VS on the server and work on the projects directly on the servers via RDP. Seriously.

So, I ask:

What does everyone else do? Do you work via the network, or do you replicate projects locally? If remotely, do you suffer from VS performance issues.

Answer 1

We work locally and use SVN to keep all our code on the server.

I find VS 2008 quite slow working locally sometimes so I wouldn't fancy working on a network share.