I’m suddenly having big issues with Visual Studio when working in a UE4 game project. A few seconds after I open a project solution, the CPU usage skyrockets to the point where the entire computer becomes slow. The Unreal Editor even crashes at some point if it’s open.
I haven’t done anything since my previous run of Visual Studio where nothing bad happened and I could work just fine. I have Visual Assist X and Perforce, but before now everything worked fine. However, the problems appeared to begin some time after installing 4.15. For a few days I could use Visual Studio fine (on my laptop) without these problems. When I wanted to work on my desktop over the weekend, the problems began. When I went back to my laptop to see if I forgot some settings in Visual Studio with Perforce or VAX, it started to happen there as well.
I’ve tried everything I could think off, or I could find. Disabled Intellisense according to VAX docs, but this disables VAX as well (also the problem persisted). Tried disabling VAX; nothing. Tried disabling Perforce; nothing. A project I worked on in 4.14 worked fine before, so I thought I would check that one; the problem also happened there.
Whatever solution I found on the internet uses features I’m not using (or Unreal isn’t using). I can’t check if it happens on a normal C++ solution, since I don’t work with that. At the time of writing, I’m uninstalling VS2015 on my desktop and will install 2017 RC to see if it happens there as well.
It could be because of the massive include changes of the engine. Most of the sourcecode now includes different headers so Intellisense and VAX have to scan through the entire engine code again.
That’s what I thought. However, even after VS said it was “Ready”, CPU usage remained high. Also, VAX listboxes and other features did not work, or VS was just so slow that it would take too long for them to work.
I’ve installed VS2017 and indeed with VAX it did the same when scanning for includes. This time however, CPU usage did go down to almost zero afterwards. Everything else now also properly kicked in when it was ready. Hell, even default Intellisense worked much faster than in previous versions before I installed VAX.
I could check the vc.db file once I’m back with working on my laptop after the holiday, which still has VS2015. I’m content with working with VS2017 RC on my desktop. I’m not fond of using a pre-release version of software with actual production work, but a friend of mine has been using it without a problem. I only have to wait until Perforce updates their plugin, so I have to use the visual client separately, which is a bit counterproductive, but oh well.
In any case, I will update this topic when I have checked my laptop.