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Comment by throwaway_pdp09 | Hacker News Reader

I have old spinny disks and it is a VERY, VERY simple and useful feedback for DB work to hear it fighting itself.

As an aside I get the feeling software is being written more and more to assume SSDs. Starting up visual studio from fresh on my machine will thrash the disk. Disk read is roughly (average) 2MB/sec throughout. Disk queue length will hit 10 several times. It takes 4 mins 50 secs (290 seconds) before the disk will calm down - I just timed it. Total mem for the process when all's finished - 204MB! That's all!

My feeling is the VS code is spawning many threads which are each fighting each other for the disk. It's really, really poor.

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This is one of my biggest pet-peeves. Whenever I have to help people debug performance issues with their machines it's almost always due to a bottleneck on their disk.

For my family members that have laptops with those shitty 5400rpm HDDs with 8MB read/write buffers - I can't blame them and just tell them to upgrade to an SSD. I've witnessed Windows update hogging 100% of the disk activity for 30+ minutes after reboot on these machines until they're actually usable...

But for my developer friends who I figure should know better, they never seem to think of looking into disk activity. It's almost always things like applications hanging/blocking on disk due to lots of different processes trying to read/write at the same time on an HDD or "small" RAM size causing constant thrashing on a disk due to memory being paged in and out of swap constantly.

> As an aside I get the feeling software is being written more and more to assume SSDs.

I agree with this observation in general. I don't use VS Code in particular but you've given solid evidence of a seek-heavy/HDD-unfriendly workload.

> My feeling is the VS code is spawning many threads which are each fighting each other for the disk. It's really, really poor.

I agree this is a poor match to your hardware, but if you're saying this is evidence of poor engineering, I disagree. IDEs' most demanding customers are using high-core-count CPUs with SSDs and expect top performance with heavy workloads. So the Visual Studio team needs to make this fast, and I don't think they have much reason to care about HDD-based installations' performance. Most software developers won't have trouble affording SSDs to store their OS files and current project, and the ones that will aren't paying to drive IDE development either.

While Visual Studio is undoubtedly a great IDE, it's biggest issue for me always been performance, especially when paired with ReSharper - this has been the case even before SSDs were ubiquitous.

Honestly, I'd strongly recommend you get an SSD - prices are really cheap nowadays.

Is VS a great IDE. It's laggy, it's too 'helpful' eg. it's going to add a close bracket if you type an open bracket unless you tell it not to, in which case it's a bitch to customise (took me 20 mins to find that option) and no luck so far if I want to adjust eg. menu & tab font to make them larger.

It can do refactoring etc. and has context-sensitive help/completions but honestly I work in emacs because it offers so much more - except the high-level refactoring etc. Omnisharp works, sort of... VS just isn't as good as emacs in many, many basic ways.

Anyway, I'll look at SSDs and stop nattering about editors.

I do think it's a great IDE, apart from the lag - though that is obviously a big issue.

In fact, after working with VS for years and getting more and more annoyed by the lag, I tried JetBrains Rider - I'm a total convert, it's one of my favourite ever pieces of software! The UI takes a bit of getting used to if you've been using VS for a long time, but not that much. Plus there's an excellent dark theme that is quite close to VS's.

Rider is absolutely stuffed with features and config switches - it's close to feature parity with VS, with VS able to do a few things Rider can't, and vice-versa. Rider absolutely flies by comparison to VS, and is more stable too. Oh, and edit-and-continue "just works" in Rider, whereas I've always found it problematic in VS.

After getting an SSD, trying Rider is my next suggestion :)

I really don't like VS. I did use jetbrains and whoa! Nice!. I'll check out Rider, which is totally new to me (thanks).

The thing about "I do think [VS] a great IDE" is you haven't experienced emacs so you don't know what can be. What emacs is bad at: all the things VS is good at, the high-level code 'understanding'. But honestly for writing/modifying/moving around/various other stuff, emacs is just so astonishingly comfortable when you get used to it. It's not "I don't need to use the mouse", more "I barely need to think about it". And then you've got stackable clipboard, registers, macros from heaven, regexps that just work, so much more...

And perhaps best of all, it's written by programmers for programmers. VS feels like management have been involved in featuritis and "UI/UX experts" as they think of themselves but aren't, have been allowed out of their cage too often.

I'll not recommend you try emacs, it's a lot of investment but if you could get emacs to do high-level stuff as well as the low-level... Right, time for me to stop hijacking this thread!

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