Freezing in large project

Got a problem in a old large website project...I can't open the Mindscape settings page or VS2010 freezes, and when I try and just save a plain .css it also locks VS.

Here's the size of the project: 27,350 files @ 9.29 Gigs (mostly images\movies are eating the size...but I think it's the file count hosing it?)

So here's what happens (repeatable) 1) edit a .css 2) Save 3) CPU jumps to 50% usage 4) RAM climbs by like 10 megs\sec 5) When ram hits like 2.7GIGS...visual studio starts responding again, and CPU drops to 4% and Ram to 500Megs

Steve

Only on .css files, or does it happen when you save a .less file as well? Are you minifying the .css file? Does the project contain a large number of other .css files?

(You're right, it will be the file count hosing it. I think the problem occurs because when you save a file we need to check whether any other files depend on it, and if we need to check 27349 other files, that could take a few moments. We do try to filter out non-candidates which is why I'd be interested to know how many other .css files the project contains.)

Well I JUST installed mindscape on that VS instance with the intent of converting some of the CSS to LESS. SO right now there's zero LESS files :)

However like I said I can't open the menu to select which items to minify, and I can't really even save a .css.

Total CSS files: 364 placed seemingly randomly around the site :)

Steve

...I can zip and send them all if you're curious :)

And this was working before? Because I'm testing with 3000 files, and it takes more than 30 seconds with maxed out CPU to save even a small .txt file, plus the typing keeps locking up (again, even in .txt files), and that is without Web Workbench installed. Don't get me wrong, I'm entirely open to the possibility that WW makes things worse, but from preliminary testing the vast majority of the lockup is spent in Visual Studio's normal save activities, and the WW overhead seems fairly minimal. Was it really smooth before you installed Web Workbench?

Yeah, working perfectly before and working fine after...website project, not webapp (if it matters). There's even multiple projects attached to the solution.

The second I enable WW it all just goes into the crapper, disable and restart VS, fine again.

I can send a video if it helps?...or again, the files.

Steve

Ah, I think the trick is splitting the 27350 files across a large number of folders. That seems to make Visual Studio run more smoothly, so I can now see the Web Workbench overhead. Investigating.

Okay, we have a candidate fix for this and it will be in the next nightly build. (The issue was that when you save a file, for each potential dependency -- i.e. each CSS file in the project -- we have to check whether that CSS file depends on the CSS file that has changed, i.e. whether that CSS file is minified and imports the changed file. For Web Sites we store the compilation settings in a XML file, and we weren't bothering to cache the XML across the save operation. For normal sites with only a couple of dozen CSS files this isn't an issue, but in your extreme case, it resulted in us opening the file and parsing the XML hundreds of times.)

Thanks much, fingers crossed :)

Ok so I have another project, 391 .css files.

A "saveall" (using the Mar 30th build) still takes 10-15 seconds (also a website project)

Is there something perhaps in the options you could put in to let me only parse certain directories, or certain files, or something to limit the scope that might make it faster?

An option to exclude directories wouldn't help, because we're not parsing the CSS files: all the dependency information is in the WebWorkbench.mswwsettings file.

A test Web Site with 1500 files including 300 CSS files, evenly spread across 15 folders, saves in a fraction of a second on my machine if only a single file is dirty. With 5 dirty files, around 1000 lines each, it takes around 4 seconds to do a save all, or 2 seconds if the files are not being minified. This is a reasonably grunty machine though so I could see it taking a bit longer on some machines.

Do you have the Web Workbench Settings window open when you do the Save All? Are any files set to minify? Have you changed the settings for any files since the last save?

Are the 391 .css files all in one directory? If not, how many directories are they spread across and how many in each directory? How many other files are in each directory? How many .css files are open and dirty when you do the Save All?

I'm also experiencing issue with freezing. Working on a clean Umbraco install (v4.7.1) - no Less or files being minified and 1 save to 1 JS file takes 25 seconds.

Looks like about 100 JS & CSS files spread across multiple directories.

Cheers, Paul

If you remove all the non-JS/CSS files from the project, does it still freeze?

If so, can you zip up the stripped-down project (i.e. with only JS and CSS files in) and post it please? We have been trying hard to reproduce this behaviour but without success (and while Steve's offer to send us a 9.3 GB project is generous, we'd prefer to leave that as a last resort grin).

Also, can you look in Extension Manager and let us know which version you're running? Thanks!

I can't replicate the problem now - I just upgraded to the latest version: 3.1.176.20214 since my last post and this seems to have resolved the issue...