Resharper for huge projects, use or not use?

Question

I've just asked my manager why our company does not use Resharper, and he, kind enough, told me that our projects are so huge to use Resharper, because it will slow our computers to their knees.

I'm still getting the source code from TFS, it seems to take 2 hours more(ahhh), each solution should contain about 30 projects, each project contains 50-100 .cs files. Our machines are running on Q6700/4GB RAM and Windows 7 x64 Enterprise, VS/TFS 2010 .

I'll try it myself, but I want to ask if Resharper (latest version) is suitable for huge project. Is there a change for me to configure/tweak VS/Resharper to get acceptable performance in my situation? Have you faced same thing?

Thank you very much

Answer 1

I'd once to work on a project with 180 projects in the solution, with VS 2008, R#4 and only 2Gb of RAM. The trick was to unload the projects from memory (right on the project in solution-explorer, then unload). I worked mainly with 5 projects and only they were processed by R#. If I had to get a newer version of an unloaded project, I used the source control client (source safe for instance), then I ran msbuild.exe mysolution.sln in a command line console. This recompile the whole solution, in a background process without the full dev environment.

Answer 2

Use Resharper no matter what. Your productivity is so much improved by it, that you can afford an insignificant performance decrease. It gets a bit sluggish with very big classes (500 lines+), but who in their right mind create those kinds of monster classes these days? :-)