I have been using NCrunch for a while, but the random Visual Studio UI freezes and unresponsiveness is starting to get in my way.

Every now and then when I save the current file Visual Studio will freeze become unresponsive for ~30 seconds.

I have already lowered the number of CPU cores assigned to NCrunch to only 2 and the remaining 6 to Visual Studio, but that doesn't seem to help. Isn't NCrunch meant to work completely in the background, because it almost looks like it's blocking the UI thread or something?

I am using version: 1.37.0.46b on a fast Intel i7 machine with an SSD drive.

Hi,,

Thanks for your reply. I have lowered the cores to 1 for ncrunch, threads to 1 and processes to 2 and it's still happening :(. I see no such issues when I run the same tests with the CodeRush test runner :/. I also think that the freeze is not happening during the test run, but rather during the "reprocessing" part when it rebuilds the assembly and before it runs the tests. The more often I save the more often it happens. ;)

Can I enable debug/verbose mode to see where it gets stuck?

Also when I disable NCrunch I can see that its processes "Ncrunch.runner.exe" or similar remain active.

P.S: Email notifications for this forum don't seem to work.

* Code base is ~18,000 lines (*.cs) + maybe ~3000 in *.cshtml ASP.NET MVC views. There are 21 projects in the solution (in the middle of a large refactoring)

* Unfortunately only 163 tests (as per what NCrunch reports) - NUnit and MSpec

* Building the solution from Clean to full build with VS takes 1 minute 10 seconds.
* Running all tests with the CodeRush unit test runner (tests run synchronously) takes 1 minute 30seconds

* Maybe half of those are small integration tests that initialize/destroy a local SQL database programatically (using fluent migrator) before each fixture. Definitely not resource heavy though (clearly slower than standard test, but still not that resource heavy).

* Custom build steps:
- PostSharp (added recently - was seeing the VS ui freeze problems before that)
- NuGet with package restore - I have just added ".\packages\**.*" to the solution "Additional files" to avoid package downloads each time.
- 1 custom post-build step where I copy 15 small files over using xcopy

With the project size you've described, NCrunch should be absolutely flying. I find it a bit surprising that Nuget package restore would be causing poor responsiveness in the IDE (i.e. lockups and such), though it isn't a surprise to me that it would add to your build times. NCrunch 1.37 introduced an auto configuration feature for Nuget package restore, and the alternative to this was to add the packages folder to the 'Additional files to include' setting as you've done. I'm keen to hear how your further testing goes - hopefully you've found the culprit.