Visual Studio hangs constantly during build

Question

Probably between 25 and 50% of the times I build my solution, I see this:

"The operation you requested is taking longer than expected to complete. This dialog will close when the action completes."

I hate this window in ways I can't describe. It never resolves, the Cancel button is never enabled, and the only way to remedy it is to kill the devenv process and load up my entire solution again, knowing full well that I've fixed nothing and I'm equally liable to see the same thing when I attempt my build.

My solution is about 60 projects in total, which are mostly C# class libraries, with a few each of web applications, web services, and console applications. However, the problem persists even when building one slice of the codebase with the majority (50) of the projects unloaded.

My problem is that the output windows doesn't tell me anything at the point at which it freezes, and I don't know how else to determine the cause of this lockup. If I were to guess, I would assume that it's a deadlock in the filesystem or something, but I don't know how to go about proving this--much less how to prevent it.

What can I do to diagnose and eliminate this from my solution so that I never see it again? In general, how can I diagnose problems that occur during a build?

Answer 1

Had a similar issue, VS would hang for 45 or so seconds then build for 4 seconds and complete. The 45 seconds of hang would not produce any output to GUI and VS would hang.

Using ProcMon I could see 3 million+ file operations on the /packages/ folder via devenv.exe when I would build this project (and would continue for some time after)!! The first steps of the build you can see that it was checking EVERY PACKAGE to see if it needed to do a package restore (it did not).

Since I tend to blame NuGet for everything, I disabled NuGet Package Restore "allow NuGet to download missing packages" checkbox under Visual Studio -> Options -> Nuget Package Manager -> General. To my delight, the build was very fast. 5 seconds total!

Turns out that we had enable package restore on build enabled (I think this is on by default now in VS) AND we also had the packages checked into source control. It seems this causes TFS to thrash in some way... Checking for restoring packages must trigger TFS to do some source control operation checks.

FYI this was VS2013 UPDATE 4 - Nuget version: 2.8.50926.663, on a sln with NumberOfProjects = 38, but I could recreate this hang just building a single csproj with 2 dependencies.

Update:

Localhost "Rebuild All" on Sln with SccNumberOfProjects = 53 was taking 7:05 with 2 minutes of visual studio frozen / unresponsive

• down to 4:14 on a 2 core i5 with no freezing
• down to 2:44 on a 4 core i7

Also: This was on a machine with various file watcher security tools, likely not adding any speed to this whole process... and possibly to blame.

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