Visual Studio 2012/2013 Slow "List Members" Intellisense

Question

I am coding in VB.Net using Visual Studio 2012 (Premium, Update 3, ReSharper 8). I have the ReSharper intellisense deactivated and I am using the standard VS intellisense.

For a while now I have been experiencing serious intellisense performance problems. My issue appears to be specific to the "List Members" subset of intellisense. Almost every time list members intellisense is activated it is taking around 2 seconds to load and display the list. The application hangs until the member list has been displayed.

I used Process Monitor to diagnose the issue and it appears that the Visual Studio cache is performing thousands of file interactions with various files in my solution every time it displays the member list. Most of these file interactions seem to be focused around generated code from T4 templates and VS-generated designer files. I have not been able to find any information about this problem online.

Has anyone else seen this performance issue and discovered a solution to it?

Vaporetto

I Have the same problem in VS2013 + Resharper 8. – Ulotrichous

I have the same problem in VS2013 for C#. Here I have generated code which means some methods exist where there are thousands of overloads, so the list member has to list +1000 members and this slows the editor for ALL operations inside the file where the namespace is used. NOT just for the list member but all editing. In process monitor one can see that devenv.exe opens the cs-file for each overload e.g. thousands of times. No idea how to resolve this. Tried deleting the suo-file but not helping. I think this is an issue with how intellisense works in this case... – Brunk

try closing the solution and deleting *.cache and *.FileListAbsolute.txt files at obj\debug/release hidden folders. I renamed a whole Solution with its Projects and there was a mess in those files, affecting performance. They will be recreated. – Churning

Answer 1

I had the same problem. It would take about 10 seconds to display the intellisense menu whenever I started typing in an html tag's class (or style) attribute.

I tried deleting my .suo file. I watched VS regenerate the cache for about 30 seconds. But it still occurs; perhaps the issue for me at least was just loading the items in the intellisense list.

I disabled BrowserLink and didn't fix it.

So, I effectively turned intellisense off for HTML files by un-checking Auto List Members in the 'Text Editor | HTML | General' tab. No more annoying pause.. no more intellisense either, but for me that is just fine.

Beater

This worked for me although I hate not having Intellisense. Not that I needed it for HTML but there's something comforting about it being there ... grrrr ... I actually noticed this problem when I added the Bootstrap framework to my project. I assume it has to do with trying ti parse all the CSS classes to display in the intellisense (?) – Welker

Turning it off in the VS Options the way wasatch describes works (and should be marked as ANSWER). If you have ReSharper installed, you'll still get its Intellisense so you really lose nothing and gain the speed back. – Discommodity

Thank fook for that! Thank you. – Goldsmith

Answer 2

I don't have Resharper installed, and face this problem - slow intellisense only for CSS (when i trying to edit the value of class attribute, or just move caret to it, VS going mad annd slows down radically overall. Also it happens if i editing CSS files. Note that happen in a web project that use Flat Dream template. Possible i should review it and delete the CSS files that are not referenced, but what is the best way to do so if it has whole hive of CSS and LESS files....

Koral

Answer 3

Unfortunately the issue seems to present in VS 2013 as well - I've had a similar issue with VS2013 + ReSharper v8.0.2 and intellisense in CSS.

Using VS 2012 + ReSharper 8.0.2 on the same solution is fine.

My issue mainly seems to stem from the fact that I'm working on an ExtJS solution (which adds hundreds of .js & .css files) and VS 2013 seems to fall over with this.

You're already using VS2012 here - is the issue present with ReSharper fully uninstalled? If not, then ReSharper's your problem. If it's VS2012, then it's something else. Check all other extensions you may have installed and try disabling them.

Are you using your own T4 templates?

Monaxial

The thing is that R# intellisense has no performance issues. It's just VS intellisense. We've switched over to VS 2013 at this point and the same problem persists. From the information in Process Monitor I don't think R# has anything to do with it and the issue still occurs when R# is disabled. It's as if VS intellisense is unable to cache any information from code generated from T4 templates or thinks the information has expired every time it tries to access the intellisense cache. We have thousands of generated files from custom T4s and it appears to be re-processing all of them frequently. – Vaporetto

I've disabled BrowserLink in VS2013 and that seems to help with performance whilst debugging. You're right though - I've since played around with different versions of R# and the issue's definitely with VS and is linked to the number of files in the solution. Smaller projects are fine. – Monaxial

Yeah, we had to disable BrowserLink immediately. It actually broke functionality in our project, ha. – Vaporetto

Answer 4

Anytime I experience such buggy behavior (I do C++ development) I delete the sdf file which belongs to the Solution. After deleting that file and staring visual studio over, intellisense is once again fast and smooth :)

Caravaggio

Answer 5

Try this:

1. Clean Solution.
2. Compile the project successfully

It actually works for me when I get this issue. I am mainly developing C# projects.

Photic

come on, I really don't think we're not at the meritorical level here to recommend others rebuilding the projects :D Especially given its the problem with CSS/HTML editor.. – Noyade

It is all about the sequence of events. You need to clean and recompile. I wasn't doing it every time i had this issue because I thought it was unrelated to the project being built. So if it seems obvious, it wasn't for me, especially when rebuilding takes some time due to the number of projects. The issue seems to be related to the intellisense caches that need to be rebuilt (or some type of project caches). So it is not that absurd to suggest this. – Photic

This made a significant improvement to my issue (vb.net) - still some pause but not the 10s+ delay after typing a keyword I had before. – Aerophobia

Answer 6

I had been facing this problems since 2 weeks, finally figured it out using a Sysinternal tool called Process monitor (ProcMon.exe). The problem has to do with the automatic updates settings. I disabled it, voila, its working.

Solution: Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Extensions and Updates -> (uncheck) Automatically check for updates->OK

Charged

-1. This suggestion makes absolutely no sense. There is zero chance that when you go to update a CSS class in an HTML document VS is reaching out to handle extension updates; the two are completely unrelated. And yes, just to be fair I did try it and no, it made absolutely no difference. – Discommodity