This thing has got the slowest IDE I’ve ever seen. If anybody has an idea how to speed the thing up, please let me know. I took out the .NET framework, which sped it up some, but I’m still spending far too much time looking at the hourglass.
What language are you using? VB is terribly slow (10-seconds per step in the debugger, for example) if the code has many warnings in it, regardless of whether you turn them off or not. C++ seems faster than 2003 to me. What are you doing with it?
I’m using VC++. I’m building a modified Apache, but it doesn’t seem to matter what I do. I made an empty console app, and it still ran slow. I’ve never used 2003; I’m moving from VC 6.
When you installed it did you just install everything? The help files are rather large…did you try uninstalling those?
…How much memory do you have? I run a full install of Visual Studio 8 on my laptop, which is an aging Pentium 4 machine with only 512MB of RAM (384MB, after subtracting the 128MB of shared video memory!). I usually only experience slowdowns when debugging something (mostly .NET stuff), or when my computer is already bogged down with other stuff (like Photoshop, Premiere, or Firefox in its “steadily-consume-about-a-gigabyte-of-pagefile” mode).
(My main work machine, though, has a more respectable 2GB of memory, and I’ve never really experienced any slowness in VS8 there.)
I have noticed that compiling with the VS8 toolkit is somewhat slower than the VS6 tools (C++), but that probably has something to do with more extensive optimizations and features like manifests.
I’ve got 760 MB on a 2.4 GHz machine. Ought to be enough.
It’s not the tools that are slow, it’s the IDE. I’ve done some poking around and found that the Intellisense stuff tends to get caught in a loop. I disabled that and things improved, but not all that much.
ZipperJJ: Yeah, I installed MSDN, but that should have no effect. I’m not about to try to work on stuff without documentation in any case.