Visual Studio long install/uninstall time?

Question

In the organization that I work at, we have a number of developers who use Visual Studio 2013. I also personally use Visual Studio 2013, both at work and at home.

What gets me is just how long it takes to install Visual Studio 2010/2013. Currently my install has been going for 2 hours and 45 minutes, though this is via the web installer. A typical install onto a developer's machine in my organization generally takes 1.5-2 hours to complete, and this is regardless if the disc image is on a shared drive or on their computer.

Additionally, uninstalling is a nightmare. With the release of the Community Edition, I have decided to upgrade from Visual Studio 2010 (For which I own a license for) to Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition. The uninstall itself took over 3 hours.

So what is taking Visual Studio so long to install/uninstall? Is there anything I can do to speed up this process when we deploy it to our developer's machines?

Solution 1

Make sure assembly binding logging is disabled. It's easy to forget to turn it off after enabling it while debugging something, and it can slow down installing VS significantly.

This SO answer has details on running the log viewer and changing the settings.

Solution 2

I was uninstalling VS 2015 community version and it was taking forever to uninstall.  After waiting for few hours, I left it running overnight, but it was still busy uninstalling in the morning, for a total time of about 15 hours...when will this thing end?

I canceled it, but even that was taking time, so I killed the process.

Then I executed the following command to force uninstall it

vs_ultimate.exe /uninstall /force

If you have community version, you run vs_community but provide same arguments, which is what I did:

vs_community.exe /uninstall /force

Run the command from where the vs_community.exe or vs_ultimate.exe is located.  Look for it using dir vs_community.exe /s in C:\ drive

This uninstall was fast; everything took like 5 to 10 minutes.

Comments

[Ramhound]

Have your ask anyone in your organization my guess its the network itself

[Thebluefish]

Everyone in my department (IT support) has the same experience. Again, even if we copy the disc image to the computer, the install time still takes at least 1.5-2 hours.

[Ramhound]

This behavir is clearly not normaly but you really have not provided enough information but most solutions will require being an admin.

[Chris Nevill]

To be fair to thebluefish from my experience this is very normal. I've installed community edition on a couple of machines in the past week and unless they are high powered workstations with SSD's VS install time is ridiculously long.

[AdamMasters]

Uninstall time is also very slow for me. I just installed the community edition (which had fairly reasonable install time) but now I'm uninstalling the web edition and so far it's taken well over an hour. Why should anything take this long to uninstall??

[threed]

This is a very typical experience for me. Installing, repairing installation, uninstalling, often even just installing add-ons or updates takes an unusually long time. But this has been my experience with Microsoft products in generally, even installing Office on a Mac takes significantly longer than any other application.

[Justin]

Take a look at the various logs for a clue, or run it in verbose mode to see where it hangs. link

[Talon]

We have the same issue. It's really rediculous, if you want to uninstall 2013 and install 2015, you can simply write the day off. It will take you 6-7hrs. An my machine has an SSD, 16GB RAM, i7 CPU and the ISO loaded locally.

[John Reynolds]

"This behavir is clearly not normal" - what computer do you have, Ramhound? I've installed VS on 3 different computers and it takes hours on every one of them. One of them has an Intel SSD, but VS installation is still painfully slow.

[Xilmiki]

Disable antivirus real time protection help a lot for me.