Visual Studio 2015 hangs during file operations

Question

Approx. once or twice a day, after working for several hours with an instance of Visual Studio 2015, the application hangs when performing a file operation (like rename or delete).

This well-known message appears:

Microsoft Visual Studio is busy…

Then only solution I found so far is to kill the process via Task Manager.

When starting Visual Studio again, In most of the cases the file operation was actually performed before the hang.

For the next few hours, all file operations work again.

My question

Any idea on how to narrow this down and ideally solve it?

Extensions

Some of the extensions I've installed are:

• ReSharper 9
• Visual SVN
• Web Essentials 2015

Too broad

I've found similar questions (like this) for previous versions of Visual Studio that were closed as too broad.

I've decided to still ask my question since I've found no questions specific to the 2015 version. Maybe there are better ways to find the reason for the behaviour in this version?

Answer 1

I've had the same issues over many years on my home laptop, which is pretty old and under-powered.

In the office on several different much more powerfull PCs, whilst working on the same solution with the same version of VS the problem rarely happens. I'm consistently performing the same actions at home and at work.

There's no additional s/w running on my laptop, in fact I even disabled most VS extensions, and my AV software, to no avail.

Whilst hardly a scientific answer, I am convinced my issues are simply caused by a well under-powered machine, which I've been too lazy to upgrade given I've got access to powerful machines in my day job.

So if your machine isn't an especially high spec one, I'd suggest trying one that is, if for no other reason than ruling that out.

Answer 2

If you are using Reshaper and moving files is taking a long time.

Do this before you move a file:

Tools → Options → Reshaper Ultimate → General → Suspend Now

I assign the Reshaper_ToggleSuspended to keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Alt+S to allow quick Suspending + Resuming.

Then resume after you are done to get the nice Reshaper features back...

Answer 3

If you are working in a WPF project, it might also be a problem with one of the XDesProc processes. When this happens to me, I kill all of those processes, and that unlocks things.