Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Browser Link and VS 2013 slowness

I recently updated my version of Visual Studio 2013 to include Update 2, and I noticed that the IDE was extremely slow when debugging web applications.  It was also extremely slow just trying to run the website from Visual Studio.  It was taking around 30 seconds to one minute to go from one line in the source code to the next.  Visual Studio was freezing almost every time that I would debug anything.

It turns out that a new, very cool feature in Visual Studio was also killing my development performance.  This new feature is Browser Link.  I noticed that a SignalR script was running whenever VS seemed frozen while debugging.  It turns out that Browser Link uses a SignalR channel for the IDE to communicate to your browser window while debugging. 

Anyway, disabling this feature cured the sluggishness in Visual Studio 2013.  To disable Browser Link, uncheck "Enable Browser Link" via the menu item with the refresh icon in Visual Studio, shown below:

I hope this helps someone, because it was driving me nuts until I found the culprit.