Why is VS 2015 stopping diagnostics session is taking forever?

Question

I am trying to analyze a WPF project (WPF, .NET 4.6.1, EF 6, Moq., on a i5 machine with W10 64 bit) using the performance profiler with only "Timeline" activated.

Problem is that on stopping the program I am stuck in the "Report.....diagsession" tab with the message "Microsoft Visual Studio is stopping your diagnostics session" and the rotating hourglass. Some times it just times out, other times I get to the report eventually, but 5 to 20 minutes later.

Interestingly the time waiting for the diagnostic session to stop is included in the report. It is like the process collecting the data does not get the message to stop recording.

Using Windows Resource Monitor I have noticed VsStandardCollector.exe writing huge amounts of data to a subfolder in "C:\Users\XXX\AppData\Local\Temp\". About 9 Gigabyte in my last try, covering 10 minutes in total while my application only ran for 30 seconds before I stopped it.

Anyone with an idea what could cause the delay in stopping the session?

CPU and disk use is very low during waiting (< 5%)

Answer 1

Recently I've learnt about PerfView tool that is used for performance analysis even inside of Microsoft. It's much cheaper than VisualStudio, in fact it is free.

So you may use it to analyze performance of Visual Studio to answer your question or even better - use it to analyze performance of your own WPF application.