huge size of shadow cache in visual studio

Question

I am facing performance issue(95-100% cpu and ram usage) in visual studio 2013.
Recently I noticed that size of shadowcache

(C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Designer\ShadowCache)

is more than 10 gb. I think visual studio is slowing down because of high hd read/writes operations. How can I get rid of it?

Answer 1

You're experiencing a widely-documented bug with Visual Studio 2013, when executing one of the following activities:

1. XAML editing without ReSharper
2. XAML editing with ReSharper
3. C# and F# editing without ReSharper
4. C# editing with ReSharper

There doesn't seem to be any official fix for this yet (the bug report on Microsoft Connect is actually closed for some unknown reason), but a temporary fix seems to be:

delete the entire shadow cache

This bug only seems to occur with Visual Studio 2013, so a fix could be to upgrade to Visual Studio 2015 (which isn't the best fix, especially for a developer team or studio), or downgrade to an earlier version (again, not the best fix due to compatibility with projects).