Visual Studio Attach To Process takes a -long- time to show up

Question

Since about a month or 2, the Visual Studio 2015 Attach to Process dialog takes 1-2 minutes to show up on one of my machines. It used to take just a few seconds, it feels as if it is suddenly taking an enormous effort to retrieve the process list.

Needless to say, this is taking the swiftness out of my ad-hoc debugging sessions. Any tips to get it back into the previous working state, or insights into the underlying cause, would be much appreciated.

Restarting the computer (e.g. after a Windows Update reboot) temporarily fixes the issue.

Note: The attaching itself works fine, and is as fast / slow as ever. Most related questions seem to be about symbol loading, but that bit is working nicely.

Additional details

• My computer has modest specs (16GB mem, fast SSD, i5-6600) for a dev machine.
• According to the task manager, it is not working particularly hard while retrieving the process list. Will inspect more in detail.
• As an experiment, I waited until things got slow again, and randomly started shooting down processes using Process explorer, reducing the number of processes from 261 to 209. Fast as ever now. Seems one of these processes is the culprit (or perhaps there is a bit flip in VS at > 256 processes :D), now I only have to wait for things to become slow and do further testing.

Answer 1

I solved this in VS2017 15.5, (most likely) by uninstalling support for NodeJS and Python in VS. I got the idea when reading about someone who solved it by uninstalling PowerShell tools, which I didn't have installed.

I used the connection type default, but noticed some new connection types in the drop-down, for example, Python and NodeJS.

I trimmed away some stuff from my VS installation that I don't really use at the moment, nodejs and python support and also Azure and Boost & Google test support. After that, it was fast and smooth again. It's a bit sad that the performance is affected by the unselected connection types as it seems, I hope it will get fixed soon.