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I recently upgraded a project that uses Entity Framework from VS2010 and EF4 to VS2012 and EF5. The model was derived from an existing DB with good schema, has approximately 70 entity types, 20 function imports and 10 complex types (used to return stored procedure results).

In VS2010 EF4 it was getting unwieldy to have 60 entities with all their association lines in a single diagram. But performance in VS2010 was good and I didn't remember any significant delays from the IDE.

In VS2012 EF5 I ended up re-imported the model from the DB because builds kept indicating errors in EDMX (that weren't reported in VS2010/EF4). The ~70 tables come from 8 different schemas in the database, so I split the new model into separate diagrams for each schema and also colored the entities by schema. I then used the "Include Related" on each entity in each diagram so that all tables related to a schema were included in the diagrams (so that associations are visualized). This, in theory, is a major improvement over the VS2010/EF4 IDE as I can more easily find and work with entities in diagrams now.

Except that its PAINFULLY slow in VS2012/EF5. Tasks that should be fast result in a wait cursor for multiple seconds. Things like simply changing the fill color of an entity results in a ~5 second wait. Selecting say 10 entities on a diagram and changing the fill color results in a 20-30 second wait (approximation). Simply dragging an entity on the diagram to move it a few pixels also results in similar delays as does making any change to an entity property. Basically anything I do results in my twiddling my thumbs, which adds up fast and results in wasting a lot of time.

I'm running VS2012 with update 1 under Windows 8 Professional on a virtual machine that I'm accessing via Remote Desktop. The VM is running on a Windows Server 2012 system with 8 ~3GHz cores, 16GB of memory and hardware RAID5. The VS2012 VM has been given 4 CPU cores and 4GB of memory. The server is mostly idle with plenty of free memory, so the VM should be very fast. By contrast VS2010 was running under Windows XP Pro in a Virtual Box on my desktop with 2 3GHz cores and 3GB of memory. Plus my desktop has a lot more processor and memory contention than the server, so VS2012/EF5 should in theory be much faster.

In case it makes a difference I have ReSharper installed in both environments (v6 on 2012 and v7 on 2012).

I've experimented a bit and Googled quite a lot and but found very little. Is it known to be much slower than VS2010? Is there something about my installation, configuration or project/model that could be causing this? What are my options for making it faster? This is painfully slow and very unproductive.

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1 Answer

try to install Visual Studio 2012 Update 4.

If the perfomance does not improve, try to disable ReSharper for a while in order to test the perfomance again.


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