Visual Studio go faster! Faster!… (Well okay, maybe just phone home and tell Microsoft you’re feeling a little slow…) - Visual Studio PerfWatson

Visual Studio Gallery - Visual Studio PerfWatson

“Would you like your performance issues to be reported automatically? Well now you can, with PerfWatson extension! Install this extension and assist the Visual Studio team in providing a faster future IDE for you.

We’re constantly working to improve the performance of Visual Studio and take feedback about it very seriously. Our investigations into these issues have found that there are a variety of scenarios where a long running task can cause the UI thread to hang or become unresponsive. Visual Studio PerfWatson is a low overhead telemetry system that helps us capture these instances of UI unresponsiveness and report them back to Microsoft automatically and anonymously. We then use this data to drive performance improvements that make Visual Studio faster.

Here’s how it works: when the tool detects that the Visual Studio UI has become unresponsive, it records information about the length of the delay and the root cause, and submits a report to Microsoft. The Visual Studio team can then aggregate the data from these reports to prioritize the issues that are causing the largest or most frequent delays across our user base. By installing the PerfWatson extension, you are helping Microsoft identify and fix the performance issues that you most frequently encounter on your PC.

To allow PerfWatson to submit performance reports to Microsoft, please make sure that Windows Error Reporting (WER) is enabled on your machine, please see how to configure WER setting session. PerfWatson employs the WER service to send the collected data to Microsoft.

Using PerfWatson

PerfWatson is an automatic feedback service. Once it is installed, all you need to do is use the product, and it will automatically create an error report for every UI delay you experience in the product. It stores these error reports in%LOCALAPPDATA%\PerfWatson. This data is then submitted to Microsoft on next Visual Studio launch.

If your Windows Error Reporting permissions are set to Automatically check for solutions and upload data, the performance reports will be submitted to Microsoft automatically. Otherwise, PerfWatson will prompt the user for permission to send the collected data. This prompt can be disabled by checking “Do not show this dialog again. Report problems automatically” on the dialog.

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IMHO Microsoft has a good reputation with the handling data like this. They seem to act on it and it doesn’t seem to leak or contain “badness”. So I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and let my VS phone home when its not feeling well…

(via Ginktage - A Plugin that helps deliver a faster Visual Studio 2010 Experience)