Whenever I'm working with web projects I'm experiencing very slow save times every time I save a file (About 20 seconds for a short .htm page). VS appears to be working as the disk little icon in the status bar is blinking meanwhile, but the rest of the application stops responding until the save is completed.

The project I'm working on is located on my local folders, so no network access should occur in the save process, slowing it down. The strange thing is that whenever I'm working with C++ or C#, I don't experience this delay in saving so this issue appears to be related with web projects only.

I have read elsewhere that disabling the network will stop the problem from occurring, and that does appear to be the case, however working in a corporate environment I cannot afford to be offline while working.

Anyone know of a solution to the slow save issue, other than unplugging myself from the network ?

Does this repro with a new, file system web site, or only with one particular web project?  You say it repros with C++ or C#, so does that mean you can't repro with VB or J#?  Do you have any network projects in your solution?

I have seen reports of slowness (with FTP sites) when the site contains thousands of images.  Do pages in your site contain links to images?

• This problem occurs with all web projects, newly created as existing solutions.
• I do not have any network projects in my solution, only a simple web page (htm file) and no images.
• The problem appears to occur no matter which type of file is in my solution, even text files are very slow saving.
• All files are on the file system, I am not hosting them on any remote computer or web site.
• The problem does not occur in my C++ / C# projects (I have never tried to make a VB or J# projects).

After spending the day trying to resolve this problem, I finally found a solution !

With the help of a network packet analyzer I was able to find out what stalls Visual Studio. I found that whenever I saved a file, in my web project, Visual Studio did a DNS lookup on a host on my local network. This host was offline so although it managed to resolve it's IP address, there was no response from it. After a timeout period Visual Studio stops trying to connect to this host and goes on with it's business of saving the file.

I searched my registry to find the source of this host name and found it to be present in: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectMRUList. This registry key is where Visual Studio stores all recent projects that have been opened. In that list a project, located on a remote computer, was found. When I removed that item from the registry, Visual Studio no longer took 20 seconds to save it's Web project files.

I don't have a clue why Visual Studio feels the need to browse through my recent projects, every time I try to save a file, but my hope is that the guys developing the product will now know where to look in order to fix the problem.

(second attempt to reply. First threw 403.1 error)

Interesting!  There was a bug that was fixed before we shipped where we scanned local drives on the MRU list when the product launched.  Perhaps this is a related case.  I'll check our bug database to see if this is a known issue.  If not I'll enter a new bug.  Thanks for your information!

Thank you very much Andersen for the analysis and the solution. I had the same problem, and it worked perfectly. It feels like I just upgraded from a pentium 133 to a P4 3.0 Ghz.

I'm so glad I found this reply. I have had the same problem.

VS took 5 mins to open
Took at least 1 min to save a single file. All local machine.

Problem all started when our old dev machine went off line.

VS had all those urls in the registry and was timing out on them. What a horrible bug. I would rather see a huge error msg, then somthing work correctly, but just at the speed of business.

Any ways, I cleared every instance of the borken url out of the VS8.0 reg. And every thing works great.

Thanks!

I'm also having this issue.  I'm using Visual Studio 2005 and I've created a ASP.NET website (using VB.NET) that is saved onto a network drive.  Almost every save takes a minimum of 20 seconds (tacks the CPU and locks up the IDE).  The network is running fine.  I've cleared the registry MRU list above which hasn't helped. 

I've haven't turned on a file system watcher though I may to see how much IO is going in and out (I recall reading someone having a similiar issue that identified VS doing a lot of read/write calls to various files).

My virus checker (Symantec) appears to have been the culprit, especially when dealing with network drives.  I temporarly disabled it on a number of occasions recently to test and I didn't have the Visual Studio IDE slow down for near as long (the longest now is 5-6 seconds and it only happens every, I'll guess 10th save or so).

Thank you for spending some time and come out with a solution,

I was annoyed by the delay too much. thanks.

I have found another culprit in the slow save (and launch vs2005).

Much like the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectMRUList
there may be offending remote projects in:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\DefaultFileOpenLocation
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\DefaultOpenProjectLocation

and any other values in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0

This is, of course if you have opened a remote project that no longer exists.

My problem came from the fact that i was setting up a new server and migrating projects. After some setup time, but before we added it to our network permanently it was shut down. During this time my VS2005 slowed to a near halt. Apparently, the last opened location gets det to the default and since, for me, that was a server that was off line,  VS2005 (on any action) was extremely slow (apparently looking like crazy for the absent server).

Why VS2005 does this i have no idea.
 

Hi guys,

I still having similar problem.

We had a solution of about 76 C++ (mainly MFC) projects and everything was fine until we added 3 VB .NET projects to it.

Now it takes about 1 minute to open solution (white screen during that) and about 2-3 minutes if I hit "Save all" button, even if one or none files opened and nothing changed anywhere !

(Just "save" for one file works fine).

I tried the suggested solutions (registry/antivirus/paths/defragmentation) but it did not helped :(

Any ideas on at least how I can trace down the problem ?

VS become almost unusable  on Core 2 Duo 2.66 machine with 3GB of RAM (We using Visual Studio 2005 SP1 + Vista SP + Surround SCM source control on Win XP Pro SP2)

 Thanks a lot guys! The same problem in VS2008 too.