Everything you want to know about Visual Studio ALM and Farming
Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server. Learn more about Brian.
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I’ve written a couple of posts in the last month or so soliciting performance feedback from you all and talking about our performance efforts. Since we realized the degree of performance problem that we still had, we have spent a ton of effort working on understanding it and making it better.
Just yesterday, we made available a build we’re calling “SLCTP1” (Super Limited Community Technology Preview 1 :)). That build is only available under NDA and is only being provided to customers who have reported specific performance issues and worked with us to narrow them down so that we could improve them. We’ll be doing another SLCTP build in a couple of weeks, followed by a more generally available preview in the new year. We are serious about addressing your concerns and ensuring that VS2010 is the best version of VS we have ever shipped in almost every respect.
One of the areas we’ve gotten a lot of feedback on is intellisense performance. We’ve made a ton of improvements. Below, I’ve included some before and after videos running on a Netbook. The first video approximates the typing performance in Beta 2 and the second is what we are seeing today (with all of the fixes that we have made).
Now I have to say, I have some trepidation in posting these. When I looked at these videos myself, I thought – How could we have possibly shipped Beta 2 this way? And, The current is WAY better but I still wouldn’t call it great yet. The first thing I will observe is that I have a number of other videos on less constrained hardware where the difference is MUCH harder to see (because Beta 2 wasn’t nearly so bad). I’ve posted this one precisely because it highlights how much difference we have made. Clearly we had some serious CPU bottlenecks in Beta 2 that didn’t show up on high end dev machines but did on under powered net books. Part of what we learned from Beta 2 was that testing on our pristine, relatively new, test machines in our lab was not a very realistic reflection of what customers would see. We’re addressing that.
Here they are as I grimace :(
We’re not done. We have a lot more work in the queue to make performance even better but I wanted to share with you some of the great progress we have made.
Brian
Cool! Thanks to you and the team for continuing to work on VS2010 Perf issues.
I've been using VS2010 B2 on a PDC Acer and I have to say, well, I CAN do some coding... :/
VS2008 IDE works great on that box, but VS2010, kind of painful. BUT I also knew that it's still in beta and knew you guys were still focused on wringing out the best perf possible (in the time available)
This post just confirms that!
And yes, please continue to look at lower end machines. Give some of the IDE Dev's a PDC Acer and ask them to do some production coding on it... (nuff said)
Anyway, again thanks for the update on this...
Man I am SO looking forward to 3/22/2010! :)
Is this only looking at performance with the VB intelisense editor? I'm finding the C# one ok but not great so perf boosts there would be great :D
The video shows VB but most of the performance improvements will apply equally well to C#.
good job, keep it up!
Please review performance of the intellisense in XAML code as well with large XAML files open and dependencies across files. I found that very very slow compared to C#.
Even Ctrl+Tab between multiple XAML files and/or C# is painfully slow.
Great job! please check the html designer/source switch. VS2010 have the same pain if you have a page with bunch of elements .. it takes a while until the page being rendered
I couldn't be happier to see that you're really working to nail performance. There are plenty of other rough spots in b2 such as slow load time for the Xaml designer (could I have an option to disable it completely?) and slow compile & stop debugging experiences.
Congratulations on fixing performance with Intellisense. Now if you could focus on the 100 other performance issues with VS 2010 I may actually try using it again. I have this sinking feeling that VS 2010 is going to be the Vista of development IDE's. Sad state of affairs.
The most important thing is for Intellisense to be asynchronous. In the first video it clearly is not asynchronous; in the second video it is hard to tell whether it is asynchronous or just faster. Often when I am typing I don't need Intellisense because I already know what I want to type. I should not have to wait for Intellisense to pop up if I am just going to ignore it anyway. But I don't want to turn Intellisense off because sometimes I want it. If Intellisense were asynchronous, and didn't block normal text entry, it wouldn't have to be so blazingly fast.
David, you are right, the first video doesn't look asynchronous, but the irony is that it actually is. The wierd thing is that for some reason the priority of the IntelliSense thread was higher than the typing one and starved typing of CPU cycles. We've since fixed that and it's part of why the "after" video looks so much better.
Huthaifa Afanah -
You mentioned a performance issue when a page has a bunch of elements. Would you mind sending me a sample page (msnow at microsoft dot com) so I can investigate it further?
Thank you,
--Mike Snow
Is there any connection between the 'IntelliSense issues spoken of here and the 'Intellitrace issues which have been resulting in VS 2010 beta2 down-time > 50 ?
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=498240
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=504538&wa=wsignin1.0#tabs
Yes, it is possible. Steve Carroll is investigating these issues. I will ask him to look at these.