Visual Studio 2008 leaks memory building solution with 200+ projects

Question

It seems that Visual Studio 2008 Professional is leaking memory on my Windows 7 machine. I was wondering if others have experienced this and if so, what solution there might be.

I am working with a large solution, over 200 projects. (Yes, I know that's a lot.) When I clean and then build the solution, I've noticed that my page table bloats up by about 450 MB or so. This memory never goes away until I reboot--shutting down Visual Studio does not make it go away. If I do another full clean and build, the page table--not the page file, mind you, the table itself--bloats up by an additional 450 MB. Pretty soon I reach a point where my page table is 4 or 5 gigs and I have no choice but to reboot.

Any ideas? Google searches don't turn up much.

Answer 1

Build is a common scenario in Visual Studio and one that is closely profiled by the team. For it to leak 450MB per build, even on 200 projects, is something that should have shown up in internal testing. The most likely cause of the leak is any extensions that are installed.

Have you tried disabling all extensions and repeating the scenario?