Why does Visual C# express 2010, becomes slow and choppy, and the handles in Task manager become excessively high?

Question

I am using Visual c# express 2010. Normally it works fine, but often (not always) when I leave it open for a few days the program itself becomes choppy. It takes half a second for a mouse click or keystroke to register. Even moving the mouse on the screen is choppy. I have attempted in the past to test if it was the project I am working on, by running it and playing with it for a few hours, then leave it running for a few days, but it doesn't seem to have any problems. only VCSExpress.exe seems to have the problem.

The reason I chose to post this question today is that when I started working, it was choppy, I shut it down and restarted, worked good for an hour, then starting getting choppy (after only an hour), same problem as always, shut it down and restarted, and now it working fine.

Anyone have any ideas.

I am programming in Windows. C# Winforms. and sql

Answer 1

Visual studio is a very capricious creature and these sorts of performance problems are not uncommon at all. As nearly as I can tell this is caused by resource deadlocks within among other programs that cause a few different requests to jockey for rights to a specific resource, be it the mouse, a file, the graphics card, or anything else it feels it might need. I have had problems like this surface on literally dozens of different computers with wildly different hardware. A few of them have no other major applications installed besides VS2010.

The only thing I have been able to find that helps control the problem is to use a program like Process Lasso, which will allow you set core affinity for visual studio on load, to restrict VS from using the first 1 or 2 cores on the machine. This will not fix the problem completely, but in my experience it makes it less common and also reduces the severity when it happens (it will, at least, not freeze basic file navigation and mandate Ctrl-Alt-Del to kill the process in a hurry).