I have been experiencing poor Visual Studio build performance on and off for a couple of years in a large, 30ish project solution. This used to happen in Windows 7, still happened in windows 10 and has really come to a head since the anniversary update. I had also noticed Chrome processes hanging around after closing chrome that couldn’t be ended and applications sometimes seeming to hang for 15 or 30 seconds before starting up.
My dev machine is 6 year old laptop, but it’s only 6 years old in the same way as a sweeping brush that’s been going strong for 30 years – just 16 new heads and 4 new handles… My laptop is a core i7 950 – 3Ghz and now has 24Gb RAM and a 1Tb SSD and 4Gb RAM disk.
Anyway, my project used to build pretty quickly but sometimes seemed to slow down and take about 15 minutes to build if I did a rebuild all. I put this down to various new things like NuGet packages etc etc. I tried lots of different things such as excluding my build tree from antivirus, disabling all sorts of stuff like Trusteer Rapport and, most recently, blaming Cortana. However, it wasn’t such a big deal for me as I rarely had to do a rebuild all and I haven’t done that much major development on this project for about a year.
Recently I have had to implement a major new feature into the core of my product. Everything was painfully slow and I noticed that one of my tests (which did an on the fly compilation) was taking a whole minute to complete. I know this wasn’t previously the case.
I scanned all my drives for malware using my ESET antivirus and Malwarebytes too. Nothing. This morning, I started disabling services like bonjour and a couple of VPN services. No different. I tried disabling Trusteer Rapport but couldn’t due to “Access Denied” errors.
I really didn’t want to get rid of Trusteer Rapport, as I value the protection it gives to online banking, but I finally decided to uninstall it. WOW! It’s like a new PC. The whole project now rebuilds in less than 10 seconds and the test that took one minute now takes 300ms…
Anyway, if you’ve got a slow Windows 10 PC and Trusteer Rapport, try uninstalling it!