Microsoft's Visual Studio 2013 Performance Tuning
For each recent release of Visual Studio, Microsoft has been committed to improving its everyday performance. VS2012 introduced asynchronous loading in an attempt to speed up the load time for large solutions, allowing developers to get to work more quickly after launching Visual Studio.
According to Ben Bradley from Microsoft, users have consistently requested shorter solution load times. In VS2013, efforts to reduce load times continue. Bradley explained that during this round of improvements, the team worked to identify which files were most important to users at the time they last closed Visual Studio. Then, upon the next launch of Visual Studio, the program prioritizes making these files available to the user first. This allows users to begin working while the rest of the solution’s files are loaded in the background.
In addition, Bradley mentioned that after further research, the team faced a decision regarding when to load the remaining (or deferred) files. Loading these files during user editing could impact the responsiveness of the IDE. As a result, the team decided to load only those deferred files on-demand, meaning they are loaded only when the user needs them. This implies that, in some cases, certain files may never be loaded during a single work session. It also means that, for other large solutions, users may experience faster startup times but encounter more instances where they need to pause and wait for less commonly used files to load.
The changes in the loading process became part of the previously announced performance improvements for the C++ IDE. The first aspect of these improvements dealt with enhancing configuration switching. According to Li Chao, a software engineer at Microsoft, configuration switching is now 75% faster compared to VS2012. Other ongoing changes include notable highlights such as improved responsiveness while typing in the main editor, faster C++ build speeds, and expanding the collection of real-world usage patterns for Visual Studio.
With last week's release of Visual Studio, the official RTM code is now fully available for production use without any restrictions. If you have the chance to open some existing projects with this version, we hope you will share your feedback on the performance differences (good or bad) in the comments below.