Windows Powershell and Visual Studio Running Extremely Slow

Daniel Bulakh 15

Hello,

I work as an IT support engineer for my company and a user reached out to me saying that they have been experiencing issues with their VS code and Powershell commands running very slow. I recreated the same environment on my laptop, and I had the same issues with it being slow.

A test I did was running this command in Powershell as an admin

cd c:\

This took about 11 seconds to complete when in reality it should take no more than a second.

A week ago, this user reports it was running fine and fast with no issue, but seemingly starting on 4/23/2024 it became slow.

Does anyone else have the same issue? Perhaps it's from a recent windows update that is causing it run very slow.

Thanks!

Tianyu Sun-MSFT 27,356 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-04-25T05:59:25.31+00:00

Hello @Daniel Bulakh ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

May I first confirm, you are using VS IDE(Visual Studio) or VS Code(Visual Studio Code)? As they are two different products, the cause may be different.
Richard McCrae 0 Reputation points

2024-04-25T07:31:57.89+00:00

UPDATE: Installing Powershell 7 via Microsoft Store appears to have solved my problem

I use Windows 11 Business, version 22H2.

Powershell also began running extremely slowly for me. Both via VS Code and as a stand-alone shell window. This began around April 23, 2024.

My Windows update history shows that this update happened on 04-22-24: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/april-9-2024-kb5036893-os-builds-22621-3447-and-22631-3447-a674a67b-85f5-4a40-8d74-5f8af8ead5bb
Richard McCrae 0 Reputation points

2024-04-25T08:01:07.0066667+00:00

Installing the new version of Powershell, Powershell 7, via Microsoft Store seems to have fixed my issue. Sort of, still choppy. After a restart my Powershell is running like normal for now....
Daniel Bulakh 15 Reputation points

2024-04-25T17:26:40.6733333+00:00

It is now only specific to Visual Studio 2022. Downloading Powershell 7 made things faster but running code in Visual Studio 2022 is very slow.
Tianyu Sun-MSFT 27,356 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-04-26T07:20:24.22+00:00

Hello @Daniel Bulakh ,

Do you use any extension in VS 2022, for example ReSharper? If so, please try to disable it temporarily and test again.

If the issue can be reproduced, could you share us the detailed steps to configure the environment to reproduce this issue for further check?

Besides, except Windows Update, are there other things changed?
Simon Wüllhorst 0 Reputation points

2024-04-30T10:55:28.1966667+00:00
We have a similar problem on some of our Win 11 developer machines. The scale of the impact varies between the affected systems. However on all affected systems I was able to verify the problem by the following scenario while all unaffected systems do not trigger this behavior:

starting powershell.exe right after startup seems to come up as fast as excepted

starting visual studio (or some other programs like inventor) seems to trigger the problem: after visual studio is started a newly started powershell (and all subsequently entered commands) takes at least a few seconds to show up

note: when leaving the started visual studio untouched in the background for at least 10 to 20 minutes seems to mediate the delayed powershell execution

This issue seems to be introduced by the April (Update KB5036893 (win11) + KB5036620 (.net)). If these updates were uninstalled for testing the issue dissapears. After reinstalling these updates the issue shows up again.

I've done some porfiling with procmon.exe. I've filtered the output by only showing operations that took at least 3 ms to execute. If the problem is not triggered the list remains empty. If the problem was triggered (by starting VS e. g.) there is a list with a bunch of entries for file operations triggered by MsMpEng.exe reading ni.dll files within C:\Windows\assembly\NativeImages... . The most of these entries took around 8 secounds to executed and have a OPLOCK HANDLE returncode as you can see in the following screenshot:

Only if the Issue is triggered there are also a lot of "Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi" in the MPLog-file of the Defender.

... Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x8bf5ff3a Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x8bf5ff3a Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x6cbc5099 Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x8bf5ff3a Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x6cbc5099 Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x6cbc5099 Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x8bf5ff3a Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x8bf5ff3a Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x8bf5ff3a Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x8bf5ff3a Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x8bf5ff3a Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x6cbc5099 Internal signature match:subtype=Lowfi, sigseq=0x0001AABD2A1C008D, sigsha=241f62fb3e4bd53504b45d010de7891beded94da, cached=true, source=16, resourceid=0x8bf5ff3a ...

When excluding the C:\Windows\assembly\NativeImages... directory in defender settings the issue disappears immediately. While this is helpful for testing excluding this directory from defender is a bad idea for production use.

Since we use a lot of ASR rules I've tested if one of these rules may cause the performance issue. At least on our systems the "EnableControlledFolderAccess" rule seems to be the "root" cause of the issue. If I disable this rule the issue disappears as well.

At this points my investigations aren't finished yet. But probably my previous findings are helpful for others facing the same problems or someone has an idea for further investigations.

Greetings

Simon
Tianyu Sun-MSFT 27,356 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-05-03T07:29:38.4166667+00:00

Hello @Simon Wüllhorst,

Thank you for sharing your test results and insights here.

This issue seems to be introduced by the April (Update KB5036893 (win11) + KB5036620 (.net)).

I helped to add the Windows 11 tag. I would also suggest you try to report this issue by following steps here: Send feedback to Microsoft with the Feedback Hub app.

Kind Regards,

Tianyu

2 answers

Ari Volcoff 0 Reputation points

2024-04-25T09:04:11.4833333+00:00

Make sure to install the powershell 7 from microsoft store and update your visual studio 2022 to the latest version (17.9.6) - then it works correctly
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MotoX80 31,656 Reputation points

2024-04-25T11:35:11.5466667+00:00

As with any other performance problem, start with Task Manager and Resource Monitor and watch cpu/memory/disk/network statistics.

For detailed analysis, Process Monitor is a great tool to trace the file/registry/network calls that a program makes. What is Powershell doing during those 11 seconds?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

If you're running a 3rd party antivirus product, temporarily disable that. They are typically #1 on the suspect list for performance problems.
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Daniel Bulakh 15 Reputation points

2024-04-25T17:26:17.3033333+00:00

It is now only specific to Visual Studio 2022. Downloading Powershell 7 made things faster but running code in Visual Studio 2022 is very slow.

Rich Matheisen 45,091 Reputation points

2024-04-25T19:52:27.45+00:00

Does VS offer you a choice to run V5 (powershell) or V7 (pwsh). I know that VSCode does.
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