visual studio .net general:
We have VS 2005 on 4 machines, Win XP Pro, all dual core P4 (2 Prescott
and 2 not, all HT, 2 i915P 2 i875P), and we get a lot of performance
problems. One of the main issues we identified is that VS 2005 is
generating a lot of page faults, in one of the machine (1.5GB DDR 400,
dual channel, HD SATA RAID) in the measure of millions per
debug/build/application start(I mean just starting Visual Studio). The
solutions (c#) we usually work with are made of 10-20 project (in some
cases 1-4 web projects), 1000-5000 files (/obj and /bin included),
75-200 directories (idem).
In my machine, all drivers updated (especially chipset and HD
controller), disk just defragmented (with third part tools), I average
15 millions page fault per 5 minuts of CPU time of devenv.exe (plus 3
millions for aspnet_wp.exe in 2 minuts of CPU time during same
timespan). In the machine with the biggest problem (in the area of 50
millions page faults per 5 minuts of CPU time), we did add an additional
hard disk only for the page file, with some improvement (8 millions page
fault per 5 minuts of CPU time), but visible mostly during the start of
debugging sessions (previously, between the "Build: 10 succeeded or
up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped" line in the Output window and the start
of the real debug, we were waiting 15"-20", now it is 1"), and not so
much in other areas of interest (usage of intellisense, build of
slightly modified big libraries).
Any suggestion to improve the performance of VS 2005?
I would be keen to try to install the 64 bit version of Win XP Pro (the
Prescott machines are more or less 64 bit ready), and/or to buy AMD 64
bit dual core machines, but if someone can share a successfull
experience (or a successfull hardware spec), I would be really happy to
read that.

--
ale

[quoted text, click to view]

Some update in the issue: in my machine (Prescott), installing the 64
bit version of Win XP Pro, the page faults per minute went down from 15
millions to 365k per 5 minuts.
HTH,

--
ale
http://www.riolo.org