AWS Toolkit in VS2022 Renders System Unusable

Question

Since the update before last to AWS Toolkit, when running Visual Studio 2022 with AWS Toolkit installed and enabled, the entire PC grinds to crawl.

Specifically, physical memory use shoots up to 99%, there's a huge amount of continuous disk activity and CPU use rises to around 50%. This renders the entire system completely unusable (think, two minute delay between clicking and something happening). Oddly, nothing appears in the process list in Task Manager that accounts for either the levels of memory or CPU use. It feels like a monumental memory leak but really I've no idea what's going on.

I've tried completely uninstalling and reinstalling VS and uninstalling, deleting the AWS Toolkit folder in "Users...etc." and reinstalling the Toolkit. Everything is fully up-to-date.

As I say, this has happened since the update before last. It's strange that it isn't mentioned anywhere that I can find on the internet and it's difficult to imagine that such a serious issue would only happen to me.

So, has this happened to anyone else and does anyone have a fix? I wanted to raise a support case on AWS Console but I only have a basic account so am unable to do so.

Answer 1

This issue has been resolved (see https://github.com/aws/aws-toolkit-visual-studio/issues/314#issuecomment-1401060605 for more details).

The system in question is running Windows 7. At some point .NET 7 was installed onto it (possibly as a result of a Visual Studio update). .NET 7 does not support Windows 7, and dotnet publish commands started to produce internal errors, and is taking a long time to complete. The AWS Toolkit's Lambda publishing features are built on top of the dotnet CLI commands, which is how the degradation was noticed.

This can be mitigated by installing an older version of .NET (like .NET 6) and telling the dotnet tooling to use a specific version of .NET instead of the latest detected version.

From https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/global-json:

The global.json file allows you to define which .NET SDK version is used when you run .NET CLI commands. Selecting the .NET SDK version is independent from specifying the runtime version a project targets. The .NET SDK version indicates which version of the .NET CLI is used.

Add a global.json file to the same folder as your project or solution with the contents shown below, referring to the .NET SDK version you want to use (the example below uses 6.0.300)

{
  "sdk": {
    "version": "6.0.300"
  }
}