Hard Drive Speed and Visual Studio Performance

People often ask me about PC hardware suggestions at technical conferences. Specifically, "do you recommend what kind of machine I should use for Visual Studio development ?" Or "your laptop looks very fast. What type is that ?"

On this issue, some of my suggestions are very standard and obvious: Ideally, you want to get a dual-core or better CPU. I always recommend that the memory be 2 GB or more.

However, it often seems a little surprising to suggest that you always purchase the fastest hard disk when you purchase a new machine. If necessary, the cost for purchasing additional CPU processors is used to invest in purchasing fast hard disks.

Why Is Hard Drive Speed important?

In the past few years, multi-core CPUs have become fast enough. In most common application scenarios, in the end, you will not feel stuck with the cause of the processor capability on the machine ).

What is most likely to slow you down is the Seek and I/O speed of your machine's access to your hard disk. If your application needs to read and write a large number of files, your CPU usage is very low, which is typical because the application may spend most of its time waiting for hard disk operations to complete.

When you use Visual Studio for development, you will read and write many files and spend a lot of time performing hard disk I/O operations. Large projects and solutions may have hundreds of source files (including images, css, webpages, user controls, and so on ). When you open a project, Visual Studio needs to read and analyze all the source files to provide intelliisense. When you use the source code control system to check out a file, you will update the file and timestamp on the hard disk. When you compile the scheme, Visual Studio checks whether the Assembly from multiple hard disk paths has been updated. When the compilation is complete, multiple new assemblies need to be written, at the same time, it persists on the hard disk. pdb debugger symbol file (each file is saved separately ). When you attach a process to the debugger (default behavior when you press F5 to run the application), Visual Studio needs to query and load all the Assembly debugger symbol files and DLL of the application, to set breakpoints.

If you have a slow hard disk, Visual Studio will block it while waiting for it to complete these read/write operations, which will greatly slow down your overall development experience.

Some Suggestions on laptop hard drive

For most PC laptops, the general hard drive speed is 5400 rpm, which is very slow. If you want to buy a new notebook and plan to use Visual Studio on it, I strongly recommend that you get a hard drive of 7200rpm. You will be aware of the benefits that this will bring in the future.

You may think that if you buy a high-end notebook, the built-in "of course" won't be a slow hard disk. Take a look at the default configuration of this high-end ThinkPad (I use this brand) or the default configuration of this high-end Dell XPS notebook (starting at $3343, or the default configuration for this 17-inch Apple MacBook Pro notebook ($2799. Note,By default, these three high-end laptops are equipped with hard disks with a speed of 5400rpm..

With an additional $55 (Lenovo), $93 (Dell), or $200 (Apple), you can upgrade your hard drive to 7200rpm. If you invest a small amount of extra money in exchange for a fast hard disk, the performance will be significantly different. It is definitely a worthwhile investment.

Some Suggestions on hard disks of desktop computers

Two hard disk performance considerations are made for the configuration of the desktop computer:

1) consider purchasing a 10000rpm hard drive. These hard disks are ultra-fast and differ significantly from the common 7200rpm hard disks configured with the desktop machine (Jeff Atwood has a great post on this and we recommend using these hard disks ).

2) consider buying the second hard disk, set your operating system and OS virtual memory swap file (virtual memory swap file) to use one of the hard disks, and then put all your data (images, files and Visual Studio projects) are stored on the second hard disk. The advantage of this method is that your read/write operations will not compete with the hard disk I/O of the virtual memory file updated by your operating system.

Other performance recommendations for Visual Studio

Now that you are talking about how to improve the performance of Visual Studio, you may want to refer to the blog posts and articles in the workshop. There are some good suggestions:

• Tips and tricks; Optimizing ASP. NET 2.0Web Project Build performance in VS 2005
• Public Hotfix Patch Available for VS 2005 F5 Debugging Performance Issue with ASP. NET
• Speed up Visual Studio 2005
• Optimize the Launch of Visual Studio 2005

Another possible performance problem I 've heard recently is that several people have reported problems with the Google Toolbar plug-in. I don't know why it may sometimes cause a long delay when I attach a browser to the Visual Studio debugger. If you see a long delay when loading your web application, and you have installed Google Toolbar (or other toolbar), you may try to uninstall them, check whether they cause problems.

I hope this article will help you,