Speed up ReSharper (and Visual Studio)

You may be also interested in JetBrains Rider— a standalone cross-platform .NET IDE, which among other things includes almost all ReSharper features. It runs in a 64-bit process making memory issues less likely.

There are two major sources of performance problems with ReSharper installed in Visual Studio:

Your system does not meet the requirements. In this case, we suggest upgrading your system as the first step of dealing with the problems.

We constantly make sure that ReSharper works fine on modern hardware and with medium- and large-size solutions without any tweaking. We believe that Visual Studio developers are working towards the same things.

By trying to speed up ReSharper on outdated hardware by disabling some features, you deprive yourself of great tools that can speed up your development performance.

Visual Studio and ReSharper, which share the same 32-bit process push your system to its limits. Often, this is reported to happen on large-size solutions and when ReSharper is installed to Visual Studio v. 2015 or later.

In this case, provided your system meets the requirements, the check-list below will help you fix performance problems in most cases.

A significant time (up to several minutes) taken for opening a large solution for the first time is not a sign of a problem. ReSharper builds and caches a model of the solution, which is then used in almost all of its features — not only for code analysis, but also for navigation and search, code completion, unit testing and more.

Subsequent openings of this solution will not result in any significant delays because the indexing results are already cached on your hard drive.

Note that because ReSharper processes assembly annotations at the very first start, any subsequent start will be faster even if you clean up ReSharper caches.

Try this first The most common causes of performance problems could be eliminated with the following actions: Go to ReSharper | Options | Environment | Performance Guide to check and quickly fix ReSharper and Visual Studio preferences that affect performance.

If you do not use Solution-Wide Analysis, disable it or consider disabling warnings in solution-wide analysis. Even if it is disabled, you can find all code issues in your solution at any time by running code inspection for the whole solution. To configure solution-wide analysis, go to ReSharper | Options | Code Inspection | Settings.

In Visual Studio options, go to Source Control | Plug-in Selection: select None for the source control plugin. This will turn off Git or another VCS provider and improve overall performance.

Hardware check-list Make sure there is no hardware interrupts and DPCs (usually caused by bad drivers and/or virtualization).

Make sure your hard drive is not fragmented.

Make sure the pagefile is at least 1GB.

Make sure you have at least 15% free disk space (MFT fragmentation/running out of space risk).

Make sure you have at least 4GB RAM free.

Storing the solution and ReSharper caches on an SSD would help, while a RAMDisk would not make a big difference.

Recommended system software adjustments Use a Windows version currently supported by Microsoft

Keep Windows updated

Use 64-bit operating system

Add the devenv.exe, msbuild.exe, your project/solution folders, and ReSharper cache folder (by default %LOCALAPPDATA%\JetBrains\Transient and configurable) to the ignore list of Windows Defender (and other antivirus software).

Stop unnecessary services and processes

Exclude your project/solution folders and ReSharper cache folder from Windows indexing

Known Performance Problems Stale caches 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 ReSharper | Options | Environment | General and click Clear Caches. Built JavaScript files If you have some built JavaScript files (for example jquery.js) in your solution, exclude these files from analysis by listing them under the Library code section on the Code Editing | Third-Party Code page of ReSharper options ( Alt+R O ).

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: Some versions of the StyleCop ReSharper plugin

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 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 Tools | Options | Web Essentials 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, see this Parallels Knowledge Base entry.

Last modified: 06 August 2020