VS2013 Preview high cpu usage when in theory idle

Question

I have a asp.net-mvc5 application which I am developing and from time to time I can see in windows server2008r2 task manager that devenv.exe (the visual studio 2013 instance I am using) is consuming 50%ish cpu usage. Considering this is a quad-core machine that means it must be maxing out two processors. VS still appears to be responsive when this occurs. Is there anything I can run diagnostically to see what feature is causing it?

incidentally I do quite often get errors with the JavaScript language service and it tells me to restart visual studio but this isn't occurring in this scenario.

Answer 1

Try disabling Browser Link:

<add key="vs:EnableBrowserLink" value="false" />

in your web.config appSettings

Answer 2

I suggest you start a Windows Performance Analyzer session for CPU Analysis, before starting VS and keep it running in order to capture the issue.

You would be able to see the spike in CPU Usage and link it to the process causing the high usage. You can go even further and find out the module causing " burning the CPU ".

Answer 3

In my case the CPU usage went down when I closed all editor windows (I had number of cshtml and css files open). Somebody else had noticed a similar case when complex CSS files was open [1].

[1] https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/816591/visual-studio-2013-high-cpu-usage-when-idle