Visual Studio 2012 RTM has MSBuild.exe in memory after close

Question

I noticed when Visual Studio 2012 RTM was closed, that many instances of MsBuild.exe are still in memory.

Why ?

Adelaideadelaja

Answer 1

The MSBuild processes are kept running for a period of time (fifteen minutes, I believe) after Visual Studio is closed. This is an attempt to improve performance, the idea being that idle MSBuild processes could be reused if another build is kicked off soon and the overhead of spawning a new process can be eliminated.

You can disable this by setting an environment variable MSBUILDDISABLENODEREUSE=1 (before starting VS) or specifying /nodeReuse:false (or /nr:false) if building from the command line.

Related issues filed on MSConnect:

• MSbuild proliferate
• Ghost MSBuild.exe in VS11

Cadge

Same issue on VS2013 SP1 and if you run "local builds" it will never work because MsBuild will always lock down your assemblies. This solution works like a charm on VS2013 Update 1. – Floatstone

Answer 2

You can turn off the parallel build feature in visual studio. How to: Set the Number of Concurrent Builds for Multiprocessor Builds

Erdda

Should describe the answer rather than putting a link up. – Obviate