VB2008 Outperforms VB2005! (Lisa Feigenbaum)

Published 04 January 08 08:08 AM

Looking for another reason to upgrade to 2008? How about performance! In addition to making tasks easier for you from release to release, another way we can save you time and make you more productive is by making the product faster! This is a goal we are very commited to on the VB team, and for which we have dedicated an entire virtual team for the Orcas release. Take a look at the stats below to see some interesting improvements.

[**DISCLAIMER: The data posted here is what I have observed from comparing 2 runs in our internal labs. These are my observations using two large customer solutions on a specific machine. Some people will have faster systems and some will have slower. Also, the work required for each operation will differ based on your solution. Thus, your results may be better or worse. The interesting thing is to look at the improvement between versions on identical hardware. I am posting this data to try and give you a general idea of the changes - but these numbers are by no means meant to be used as an industry standard.

For those interested, here's some data on the solutions and machine that I used... One solution contains 29 projects and 2772 files, with xml comments on all methods and types. The other solution used contains 783 files. The machine has the following specs: Dual Core Pentium-D - 3.0GHz, 1GB RAM, 10K RPM HD. OS=XP. These are one of many machine specifications that we use for our internal performance testing.]

Scenario VB2005 Time (ms) VB2008 Time (ms) VB2008 is x times faster than VB2005 (2005 time/ 2008 time) VB2008 takes x% as much time as VB2005 (100% * 2008 time/ 2005 time)
Build a large project (using background compilation) 222206.25 1352.88 164.25 0.61%
Build a large multi-project solution (explicit build operation) 1618604.75 57542.75 28.13 3.56%
Build a large multi-project solution (using background compilation) 222925.50 19861.88 11.22 8.91%
Responsiveness after adding a member to a class 327.00 36.50 8.96 11.16%
Responsiveness after opening a project 255551.25 38769.38 6.59 15.17%
Invoke Intellisense to see a list of types (first time) 1192.50 530.5 2.25 44.49%
Edit-and-Continue in a solution with xml comments (first time) 441.25 210.5 2.10 47.71%
Responsiveness after changing a method statement 390.25 236.38 1.65 60.57%
10 Steps in the debugger (subsequent times) 1850.75 1167.13 1.59 63.06%
Invoke Intellisense to see a list of types (subsequent times) 79.25 51.5 1.54 64.98%
F5 when the solution is already built (subsequent times) 385.20 278.7 1.38 72.35%
Item gets added to the Error List after making an error 531.25 394.5 1.35 74.26%
10 Steps in the debugger (first time) 1336.50 1150 1.16 86.05%
Responsiveness while background compiling on an open solution 4803.00 4284.75 1.12 89.21%
Load a large solution (subsequent times) 13667.5 12407.25 1.10 90.78%
Load a large solution (first time)
(Note: This is the improvement on XP. Vista has seen about twice as much improvement for the Load Solution scenario than XP. )
19946.25 18222 1.09 91.36%
** All times are found by performing operations on customer solutions. Don't you wish we were using your solution to optimize our times? Send it in so that we can optimize for you! (vbperf@microsoft.com) We are always interested to get more customer projects for our testing.

Is there another scenario you're interested that you don't see above, where you continue to experience performance lags in your regular usage of the product? Please send in repro steps so we can take a look! (vbperf@microsoft.com)

Other interesting VB2008 Performance content to check out is listed below:

Comments

# Jorge Serrano - MVP Visual Developer - Visual Basic said on January 8, 2008 5:25 PM:

Microsoft, ha publicado una interesantísima lista de comparaciones entre VB 2005 y VB 2008. En esta lista

# yossita said on January 9, 2008 1:13 AM:

You must have a super computer to gain that much performance VS2005 and 2008 alike :-)

# eric said on January 9, 2008 2:43 AM:

"You must have a super computer to gain that much performance VS2005 and 2008 alike :-)"

or simply the project is "hello world" :P

well i'm thrilled that it's faster, vb2k5 really slows me down on large projects, and i have to break my solution into diffrent projects to compile faster.

# steve said on January 9, 2008 3:38 AM:

shouldnt the header say VS not VB?!?

# Amir Shevat's Blog said on January 9, 2008 3:43 AM:

In an interesting blog , about how VB2008 Outperforms VB2005, by Members of the VB team in Microsoft

# steve said on January 9, 2008 3:52 AM:

yes, I still think it should be 'perf of Visual Studio using VB' as these are Visual Studio actions while using VB as your dev language. If we are talking about VB performance then I think its reasonable to expect items detailing language performance. The only reason I made the observation is it appeared on my rss feed and was misled by the header.

so it was just a thought and no reason to respond with an all high and mighty comment...

# Jason S said on January 9, 2008 3:53 AM:

This is simply wonderful. VB has stood the test to times. Though it started as a common language - easy to develop winforms... it has graduated a lot in the .net world.

# Gary B said on January 9, 2008 4:15 AM:

The % column is wrong - if B is 99.4% faster than A then it would be almost twice as fast. You are showing 164.25x hence you should be saying 16425% improvement. [Or just drop the % column altogether as the x column is clearer]

# James Kent said on January 9, 2008 5:28 AM:

I thought the Non Object Oriented VB was dead. Is this the OO one?

Is the syntax of VB as clean as Java? The Java Swing GUIs are really fast too and have so many free components that are a piece of cake to use.

# Arun Philip said on January 9, 2008 5:32 AM:

I agree with Gary - the % column is wrong, and misleading.

The 'x times faster' column has been calculated as:

 old/new

while the '% faster' has been calculated as:

 1 - (new/old)

Stick to one consistent calculation technique.

That said, glad to see the lovely perf improvements.

# Chad Dokmanovich said on January 9, 2008 7:35 AM:

I'm running a 1.8 MHz claptop with 1GB RAM with 7 GB free disk space.

My drive thashes like crazy when running VS2008 and sometime just getting a content sensitive menu to pop up takes 45 seconds.

Quite often, for a minute at a time, the IDE just appears to be too buy to respond to me.

Does VS2008 really need more memory than 1GB? That is the official RECOMMENDED amount.

# Bill_McC said on January 9, 2008 7:43 AM:

I thik the last column would make more sense to folks if displayed as "% time taken" and was 1- current value, eg: the first entry would be 0.6%, andthe last one would be 89.2%

# Bob said on January 9, 2008 7:46 AM:

The % percent faster column is backwards:

Twice as fast is 200% faster, not 50%!!!

# Bob said on January 9, 2008 7:48 AM:

>>My drive thashes like crazy when running VS2008 and sometime just getting a content sensitive menu to pop up takes 45 seconds.

Chad, your system is paging it's brains out. What else are you running? SQL Server?, etc.

# JLRosado said on January 9, 2008 8:31 AM:

I've seen the VB Compiler bug (or one that resembles it) in a simpler single assembly project. In the designer I add & edit stuff but it doesn't show in the complied version (or after hitting F5). Its as if something in RAM did not get set and the JIT doent recognize that certain edited areas need to be re-compiled. After saving everything, I crossed my fingers, unloaded the guilty form from the project, exited, reopened & reloaded the form. In that ocassion it worked!

Also if you place the cursor past the End Class line in a class & then Ctrl-PgUp to go to the top of the last Sub or method, you get a send error to MS prompt, although I've not lost any data.

Other than that it looks pretty good and I'm still using it.

# post said on January 9, 2008 8:55 AM:

The math is correct if you take into consideration that 0 to 99% is the same amount of time as 99% to 100% and that time is relative to processor and download speed in the world of microsoft.

# Grain O'Salt said on January 9, 2008 9:00 AM:

Very good!! now let us see the results verified by an independent source other than Micrsoft funded blog.

# me said on January 9, 2008 9:23 AM:

The percentages column works if you define 100% as the greatest possible improvement (i.e. it works instantly), 0% as no improvement, and -100% as the worst possible slowdown (it takes forever)

200% would mean that it is finished before you ask it to do anything. We can only dream.

# Terry Brearley said on January 9, 2008 9:40 AM:

I would like to see some OLEDB or ODBC processing time, or data control population, etc.  How long does it take to go through a half-million records, or 5 million?  How long to update 1000 records in a database?  Can we see those stats?  

I am quite sure I'll be upgrading to VS 2008, and will enjoy the upgrades and advances.  But, I'd love to see some data optimization.

# S Wong said on January 9, 2008 9:58 AM:

Nowadays, performance of IDE is not very important as long as it is functioning because of the power of machine (the power is increasing every month). The most important aspects is the new features and ease-of-use  the IDE.

# M.Neff said on January 9, 2008 10:13 AM:

I immediately noticed improvements to the responsiveness of VS2008 while using VB.  The intellisense improvements were especially noticeable, which is even more admirable when you consider the additional functionality in this release.  No unexpected bugs or crashes noted so far, although the multi-project solution I'm working  with is still relatively small.  After using the VS2008 IDE, it's hard to go back to VS2005, and I will likely be converting a number of projects over just to take advantage of the improvements.

Thanks to Microsoft for putting emphasis on performance.

# Trapped By The Machine said on January 9, 2008 11:15 AM:

I think that is interesting as well but am going to wait and see how many IDE bugs pop out of this iteration of the IDE.     VS2005 had and continues to have at least as many problems with large solutions (150+ projects) as VS2003.     Prove to me that the IDE won't disappear periodically and there are no hotfixes for large solutions and we'll consider taking ours up to 2008.

# Zafer SAVAŞ said on January 9, 2008 12:02 PM:

Is there a comparison for VC# 2005 and VC#2008?

# VBTeam said on January 9, 2008 12:33 PM:

The % column has confused a number of people, so I've changed it to mean "VB2008 requires x% of the VB2005 time to complete this scenario". I hope that will be more clear. I've also included equations in the column headers. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Lisa

# Mike M said on January 9, 2008 2:26 PM:

These types of benchmarks should also include information on the test computer. Users could expect dramatic increases on their machine only to find they need to spend another $600 on their machine to get the performance enhancements.

# Pete Austin said on January 9, 2008 3:06 PM:

Does it let me edit the program while debugging, like VB6, to fix bugs without ever having to stop-and-restart my debug session? That would be a real performance improvement!

# VBTeam said on January 9, 2008 3:26 PM:

Hi Pete Austin,

Yes - VB2005 and VB2008 both have the "Edit and Continue" feature that you're remembering from VB6. Try it out!

# Paul said on January 9, 2008 6:33 PM:

To the person asking for times for updating a database - that is nothing to do with VB and is down to the .NET framwork ADO.NET classes.  This blog is about the speed of the VB implementation of the VS IDE which has always had speed issues due particularly to the background compilation.

# xybr0xym0r0n said on January 9, 2008 7:55 PM:

I didn't use the vs2k8 yet,  if that apps are much faster than the former apps i use, i think its time to shift to it, so if you have a new license copy, can you send me one?

# VBTeam said on January 9, 2008 9:48 PM:

xybr0xym0r0n,

We cannot give out license copies. (I know this might come as a surprise. :) )

However, the Express editions are available at the following link:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express/future/bb421473.aspx

# VBTeam said on January 9, 2008 9:50 PM:

Hi JLRosado,

Thanks for reporting the Ctrl+PgUp issue. We've received your bug feedback report and fixed this issue for VS2008 SP1.

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=315796&wa=wsignin1.0

Unfortunately, we are unable to repro your compiler bug with the info given here. Can you please enter it on the same Connect feedback site with more information, so that a member of our development team can take a look?

Lisa

# Rafa said on January 10, 2008 2:38 AM:

Is VS2008 still changing your project configuration properties without asking you even if you don't want to?

# Dani said on January 10, 2008 4:40 AM:

Is there any such comparison for C# projects?

# Bujji C said on January 13, 2008 3:40 AM:

Guys have you checked the dataset designer window of the ide? In my installation, the window does not refreshes, leaving the contents of the last active window displayed when opening the dataset designer. Tables and other contents of the designer window not shown unless you click around and hitting an entry.

# alandia said on January 14, 2008 5:14 AM:

aside from microsoft where can i download the trial version of vs2008?

# George Marcotte said on January 16, 2008 12:18 AM:

I was using VS2005 (full).  I decided to switch to VB2008 because it was supposed to be faster.

Did not happen.  I was able to stop and start (no change in the code) in 4.1 second.  With 2008, it's 20 sec.  and worse since I installed 2008, the "original" 2005 is doing it in 15 sec (still faster than 2008).

I am thinking about removing vb2008 and vs2005 to try get my "speed" back.  I was using VB6, the speed can not compare at all.  I agree VS2005 is doing a lot more but I like to try and see while I am doing code.  With VB2008, it's almost impossible.

Georges

# chris.strevel [blog] said on January 16, 2008 2:33 PM:

¿ No te has migrado a VS2008 ? VS2008 trae una serie de nuevas características muy chidas,

# Aaron Schnieder on ASP.NET said on January 24, 2008 7:46 PM:

I personally prefer C# over VB.NET, however the gestapo of decision making where I work have declared

# Art Hill said on January 25, 2008 2:43 PM:

Hi (VB.Net, ASP.Net environment)

I was very disappointed with VS2005 (slow IDE performance, disappearing IDE,  constant crashes, delays, etc.)  

VS2008 - slower IDE (don't know what's always going on in the background), but I type and wait...click and wait...type and wait...very very very frustrating...  

I turned off formatting and validation.  Stay away from design view and try to keep the toolbox and solution viewer closed.  Still performance issues.  Oh yeah, if I close VS and re-open, the options I turned off are right back on.  

My productivity has probably gone down no less than 50% due to performance issues alone and several members of my dev team have resorted to simple text editors to avoid using the IDE.    

Great new features, but performance just keeps getting worse with each release of Visual Studio .Net.  At this rate, I'm not sure what the future holds for the Visual Studio platform as a premier development tool as there's no question that many developers have posted concerns about it's performance.  I still look forward to something better, but for now we have to just settle for slower perfornace and lower productivity.  Hopefully something better (patch, anything) is on it's way in the very near future.

# VBTeam said on January 28, 2008 9:37 PM:

For those who asked about data improvements, please see the ADO.Net team post here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/01/28/ado-net-performance-improvements-with-the-net-framework-2-0-sp1.aspx

# JS said on January 29, 2008 8:32 PM:

We are noticing 2008 is about 3x slower opening our solutions. They are a mix of vb and c# projects. Are there any setting changes to speed this up?

# RedoBlog - The .NET Gentleman !!! said on January 31, 2008 4:54 PM:

Vous cherchez encore une ou plusieurs bonnes raisons pour passer de Visual Studio / Visual Basic 2005

# Đonny said on February 1, 2008 6:43 PM:

I'm experiencing big slowdown of VS 2008 / VB 9 for project with ~100 files.

Details here: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=324604.

Its really unusable.

# Franklin Garzón said on May 24, 2008 10:40 AM:

You can see many tests from MS about VB2005 and VB2008, great comparations. http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2008/01/04/vb2008-outperforms-vb2005-lisa-feigenbaum.aspx...

# The Visual Basic Team said on May 29, 2008 12:41 AM:

VB2008 にアップグレードすべきかどうかお悩みの方は、パフォーマンスの違いを検討してみてください。VB チームでは、新しいリリースごとに操作性の向上を実現するだけでなく、処理速度を速くすることで、時間の節約と生産性の向上にも役立てたいと考えています。これが私たちの目標であり、Orcas

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