Why is Visual Studio 2013 very slow?

Question

I'm running Visual Studio 2013 Pro (RTM version) on my formatted PC (Windows 8.1 fresh install).

I don't know why, but Visual Studio 2013 Pro is very very slow! Slow for building, debugging, navigating in the IDE... my hard disk drive LED is not lighting up at all!

I'm on a little MFC (C++) project using the Boost library.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It is something concerned with the graphics drivers. If you update them you will be fine.

Or you can disable the hardware graphics acceleration in Visual Studio according to these steps:

1. In Visual Studio, click "Tools", and then click "Options".

2. In the Options dialog box, navigate to the "Environment > General" section and clear the "Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance" check box. (Refer to the following screen shot for this step.)

3. Clear the "Use hardware graphics acceleration if available" check box to prevent the use of hardware graphics acceleration.

4. Select or clear the "Enable rich client visual experience" check box to make sure that rich visuals are always on or off, respectively. When this check box is selected, rich visuals are used independent of the computer environment. For example, rich visuals are used when you run Visual Studio locally on a rich client and over remote desktop.

References:

• You experience performance issues, product crashes, or rendering issues in Visual Studio 2013

Answer 2

Try to set Current source control plug-in to None (menu Tools → Options → Source Control), if you are using the Microsoft Git provider, which seems to slow Visual Studio 2013 down more and more the larger the repository gets.

I had the whole Dojo Toolkit framework under source control using the Microsoft Git provider, and it got to the point where there were delays from the time I hit a key to the time the glyph would appear on the screen. That bad.

When/if you need Git again, you can switch to the TortoiseGit provider or Git-Extensions, both will work without slowdown. I like Git-Extensions, personally.