When running by itself (no project opened and no extensions), Visual Studio 2012 takes less than 100 MB. When you open up your projects, those add to the total memory of course. However, if you find Visual Studio (2012) using excessive memory (a co-worker noticed 700MB , when the size of our solution was less than 100MB), there’s a couple of places to look. First, Extensions and Updates (under Tools).

Extensions (under the Tools menu)

  1. Memory leaks in extensions – Some extensions are just poorly behaved and known to have memory leaks. This may explain why when you perform certain tasks from  VS , you see your memory usage spike. .NET Reflector from jetbrains was causing one such issue. 
  2. Too many unused extensions – Disable (or uninstall) any extensions that you are not using.

Add-Ins (also under the Tools menu)

The same considerations apply to add-ins which get loaded on VS startup. Go through and remove the add-ins that are not being used.

Once we figured these out, the memory usage went down from 700 MB to 200 MB.

Anuj holds professional certifications in Google Cloud, AWS as well as certifications in Docker and App Performance Tools such as New Relic. He specializes in Cloud Security, Data Encryption and Container Technologies.

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Anuj Varma – who has written posts on Anuj Varma, Hands-On Technology Architect, Clean Air Activist.

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