Aaron Feng: CodeRush is a fat pig

CodeRush is a fat pig

Aaron Feng — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:28:00 -0500

A few months ago we purchased CodeRush with Refactor Pro from DevExpress in search of higher productivity.

At first glance, it's apparent that CodeRush is extremely flashy. There are huge arrows flying across the screen with every other key stroke. It gets old and tiring real fast. However, the flying arrows can make any demo look impressive, that's about all. All the "intelligent" suggestions CodeRush insists on trying, can drive anyone to the edge of insanity. CodeRush is highly configurable, so everything that is a nuisance can be turned off. That is the very first thing we did.

Despite all the graphical rendering being turned off, it still eats memory for breakfast. It has become so bad, that our machine will just stop responding for 10 to 30 second durations while editing. Eventually we uninstalled it on all of our machines. At any given time, Visual Studio can occupy 600 - 800 MB of memory with CodeRush installed. After uninstalling, Visual Studio consumes around 200 - 300 MB.

We have 36 projects, and around 250k-ish line of code in our solution. We are running 3.2Ghz P4 with 2GB of ram on all of our boxes. After we unintalled CodeRush, our machine started to feel more responsive again. We finally can get work done!

CodeRush does have some pretty cool features, but our sanity and efficiency of our machines out weighs it.

"CodeRush is a fat pig" by Aaron Feng

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:29:59 -0500

Mark,

It's a WCF C# project that is being developed in VS 2005. The memory consumption gets over 800MB after a short usage and continues to consume as time goes on.

The slowdown is definitely due to CodeRush checking for refactoring. Currently I'm off from work, but I can send in a more detailed report after I return.

"CodeRush is a fat pig" by Mark Miller

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:26:43 -0500

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for your post. We are definitely interested in resolving this issue to your satisfaction, however we need more information on your project, and perhaps its best to send that to support@devexpress.com so we can duplicate.

Currently the biggest contributor to memory consumption is the representation of all the elements in your code, so those will be proportional to the amount of code you have open in Visual Studio and from time to time there may be spikes in the memory consumption proportional to the amount of code you have on disk (not open in VS).

Are you working in C++, VB, C#? Is this VS 2008, 2005, or 2003? If you're in VS 2008, are you using any of the new language features of VB9 or C#3.0?

What version of CodeRush are you using?

Also, details on the sluggishness would be helpful. The 10-30 second slowdown sounds like it might be a time-consuming availability check for a refactoring, and if so there's a chance we've already fixed that in the current release.

"CodeRush is a fat pig" by Kim

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:11:57 -0500

I don't have any perf problems with neither CodeRush nor Refactor!. I'm running on a DELL precision M90 notebook with 2 GB or RAM and a Core2 T7600 processor. One thing to be aware of is that if you have many code windows open more memory is used. Keeping the number of open windows down should help, but I have to admit that I have never felt the need to close windows. Is it possible that you have some other 3rd party addin that conflicts with CodeRush? In any case I would contact the DevExpress support reporting the problem.

"CodeRush is a fat pig" by Jeremy Gray

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 13:48:07 -0500

I have experienced the same issue both with CodeRush/Refactor Pro and Resharper but, and this is the kicker, also with none of these plugins.

Visual Studio hits a wall at 800MB of memory, and I would highly suggest that you upgrade your development workstations to 4GB of memory (it is hilariously cheap these days), enable the /3GB switch, and mark devenv.exe as large address aware.

My devenv.exe was sitting at 1.5GB yesterday and was very responsive, even with Resharper running. Ya gotta like that.

"CodeRush is a fat pig" by Joe

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 12:41:46 -0500

I've had the same experience. I love the productivity gains, and so far these have outwieghed my frustration with sluggish performance.