Keep an eye on those .suo files

I’ve been getting very frustrated the last week or two with the performance of my VS 2008 IDE.  I started getting OutOfMemoryExceptions when compiling our Silverlight 3 solution and I had to close VS every now and then to get it compiling through.  Seems like the latest build of ReSharper has got a reported performance problem but even after uninstalling ReSharper I still ended up with VS using 1.1 Gig after compiling the solution.  So I created a new solution and added all the projects and the problem went away.  After compiling the solution without ReSharper VS only used 250MB!  With ReSharper installed again it used 450MB after compilation. 

So after some further investigation, it turns out that the problem was related to a .suo file that was 132MB big on my machine.  When I deleted this file everything returned back to “normal”.  Some other users have reported the same problem.

So if your VS starts acting up sluggish, delete this file and start it up again.  You will loose some information like your current breakpoints, the state of your solution explorer and other VS user dependant information, but I gladly traded that for the faster performance.