What folders does Visual Studio 2013 (and ReSharper) use?

Question

I work in a corporate Windows 7 environment where our profile is stored in a central server in a different location. Thus, opening a solution in Visual Studio containing 100+ projects takes a considerable amount of time (network latency and limited bandwidth), even though I have checked out TFS into a local folder (d:\src).

What folders does Visual Studio 2013 SP1 use for temporary data while working, and how can I override them to use specific folders which I know for a fact is on my own SSD drive?

Answer 1

ReSharper stores info in %LOCALAPPDATA%\JetBrains (local) and %APPDATA%\JetBrains (roaming), mostly. The interesting files are:

• Global settings and extension metadata (e.g. the list of installed extensions) is stored in %APPDATA%\JetBrains\ReSharper\vAny
• Extensions are installed to %LOCALAPPDATA%\JetBrains\ReSharper\vAny\packages
• Solution caches are stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\JetBrains\ReSharper\vX.X\SolutionCaches
• VS version specific, static caches are also stored at %LOCALAPPDATA%\JetBrains\ReSharper\vX.X\vsY.Y (specifically a binary form of the xml index of external annotations)
• Annoyingly, pdb files downloaded as part of the "external sources" feature are not cached in a JetBrains folder (I have raised an issue on this):
  • %LOCALAPPDATA%\RefSrcSymbols for files downloaded from Microsoft's reference source site
  • %LOCALAPPDATA%\SymbolSourceSymbols for files downloaded form symbolsource.org
  • %LOCALAPPDATA%\Symbols for files downloaded from servers declared in Visual Studio's Symbols options dialog page
  • %TEMP%\Symbols is used for symbols downloaded via the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable, unless a better cache is specified in the environment variable itself

If you're concerned simply about roaming profiles, you should be fine with ReSharper - the data stored in the roaming part of the profile (%APPDATA%) is minimal - 96Kb on my machine, for example.

But if your whole profile dir is redirected to a network share, including the %LOCALAPPDATA% section, then you could be in trouble. The solution caches can be huge, depending on how many different solutions you have (I'm over 1Gb, but with lots of BIG solutions) and the extension packages can add up too, especially since 8.2 has started shipping the external annotations as an updatable package (it takes about 60Mb).

Fortunately, you can change the settings to tell ReSharper to put the caches either in the solution dir, or %TEMP%, which can help (but make sure you ignore _ReSharper.*\ in your source control if you put them in the solution dir!).

Unfortunately, you can't move the extension package installation dir. ReSharper assumes that %LOCALAPPDATA% is actually a local part of the profile, and can be used to store data that won't get roamed with your profile.

Answer 2

Visual studio 13 use temp folder as same as system's own temp folder

My image show G:\Temp which I customized to work with RamDisk. Using Ramdisk drive for temp certainly improve the speed of many application.

If you have more RAM then you can create RAMDisk that is many time faster then SSD. Ramdisk is not safe for storing since the data can be easily lost when crash happen. You can better use it for cache that I have done in my PC.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/improving-your-build-times-with-incredibuild-and-visual-studio-2015/