Speeding up ReSharper (and Visual Studio)
This document presents a list of performance optimizations that can be applied if you experience performance issues with Visual Studio and ReSharper. Some of the tricks presented are ReSharper-specific, whereas others will affect Visual Studio performance whether you have installed ReSharper or not.
In this topic:
- Speeding Up ReSharper
- Known Performance Problems
- Known Compatibility Problems
- Improving Visual Studio Performance
Speeding up ReSharper
Disable code analysis for current file
You can temporarily disable design time code inspection for the current file by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+8. Pressing the shortcut again will re-enable the inspection. You can spot the status of code analysis in the current file by the status indicator:
If you want to bind a different shortcut for this operation, look for the
ReSharper_EnableDaemon
command.
Disable code analysis for specific files
You can tell ReSharper to skip analyzing certain files without opening them. For example, you can skip files that contain well tested algorithms and that do not change much. To do so, go to and scroll to the Element to skip section, where you can pick the files and folders to skip. You can also specify a file mask for skipping files. You will also notice that all files where you disabled code analysis with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+8 are already in the list of ignored files.
Turn off Solution-Wide Analysis
On very large projects, turning on Solution-Wide Analysis may cause performance degradation, particularly on less powerful hardware. If you find this analysis to be taking up too many resources, simply switch it off: right-click the SWA circle in the bottom right corner of Visual Studio window and choose Stop Solution-Wide Analysis or Pause Analysis.
A dialog box will pop up asking whether you want to turn off SWA. Say Yes and you're done.
Disable context actions
In ReSharper options, go to and , and uncheck the actions that are less helpful to you.
Speed up typing
If you experience slowdown while typing, you can turn off member signatures, symbol types and summary in completion lists - go to and clear the corresponding check-boxes:
If this doesn’t help, switch back to built-in Visual Studio IntelliSense under :
Disable auto-formatting
To speed up typing, you can also disable auto-formatting options under to avoid reformatting code while typing:
Speed up code templates
To speed up expanding code templates, you can turn off the Reformat and Shorten qualified references options for templates that you use:
Disable unit testing
If you don't use the ReSharper unit test runner, you can save some processing time by turning it off. Go to and clear the Enable Unit Testing check-box.
Disable the navigation bar
If you useFile Structure Window, then you probably don't use the navigation bar on top of the editor. If so, you can disable the navigation bar by clearing the corresponding check-box in Visual Studio options: .If nothing helps
If you've tried out everything described above and the performance is still down, you can temporarily disable ReSharper and check whether it was the cause of the slowdown. To disable/enable ReSharper, go to and click Suspend Now/Resume Now.
If suspending ReSharper helps improve the performance but you still want to use it occasionally for
code analysis,
code cleanup
or
reformatting code,
you might want to have a shortcut that quickly switches ReSharper on and off.
Here is how to do it: go to
and find the
ReSharper_ToggleSuspended
command, then press a shortcut of your choice and click
Assign.
Known Performance Problems
The following is a list of known performance problems and their solutions.
VS2010 with ReSharper on Windows XP slowness
This known issue can be resolved by installing the Windows Automation API 3.0. For further details, see this article. Please note that this fix applies to Windows XP only – later Windows operating systems already have this API installed.
Performance degradation after ReSharper upgrade
If you have recently updated ReSharper and observe performance degradation with solutions that were opened with previous versions, you can attempt to speed thing up by clearing the ReSharper caches and deleting the solution .suo file.
To clear the caches, go to and click Clear Caches.
You can also tweak the Store solution caches in selector on this page: performance can be improved if your selected caches storage is mapped to a faster storage medium, such as a high-performance SSD or a RAM disk.
Known Compatibility Problems
Other Visual Studio extensions
Major compatibility issues have been observed with the following products:
- DevExpress CodeRush/Refactor Pro (incompatible)
- Telerik JustCode (incompatible)
- Whole Tomato Visual Assist
- Productivity Power Tools
Performance degradation has been observed with the following products:
There are also reports on Web Essentials contributing to low performance while editing .cshtml files. If you're affected by this problem, consider going to and setting Auto-format HTML on Enter to False.
Parallels Desktop for Mac
If you're running Visual Studio in a Windows virtual machine on your Mac using Parallels Desktop, ReSharper IntelliSense lists might be very slow to render.
If this occurs in your setup, consider switching from Coherence mode to Full Screen mode. For guidelines on switching between the two modes, please see this Parallels Knowledge Base entry.
Improving Visual Studio Performance
Speed up editor scrolling
The problem with editor scrolling arises due to hardware-accelerated editor rendering. If you experience this, try turning off the following options under :
- Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance
- Use hardware graphics acceleration if available
Save time on startup
Turning off the start page and the news channel might save some time on startup. To do so, go to and choose to show empty environment at startup.
Clean web cache
If you work with web projects, web cache might slow down Visual Studio. To clean it, delete everything under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WebSiteCache.
Disable unused extensions
Go to , go through the list and check if you really need each of them. You can uninstall or disable the unused ones.
Unload unused projects
If you are not working on some projects, you can unload them from Visual Studio and reload them back when needed. Right-click on the project or a solution folder in the Solution Explorer and choose Unload Project or Unload Projects in Solution Folder - this will speed up both Visual Studio and ReSharper. By the way, ReSharper navigation features will work even for unloaded projects.
Disable visual XAML editor
On large projects, editing XAML files can feel slow even on good hardware. If you don't use visual XAML editor, you can partly solve the problem by disabling it. To do so, right-click on a XAML file in the Solution Explorer and choose Open With. In the dialog box that appears, select Source Code (Text) Editor and click Set as default.