Speeding up Intellisense on VS2015

Is there any way to speed up Intellisense on VS2015? The machine I’m working on has SSD and 32 GB RAM, there must be some configuration that can utilize these features to speed up the Intellisense.

You can use precompiled headers, it wont make it instant but should take ~1 second tops.

To do this:

  1. Open your .sln

  2. Project → ProjectName Properties

  3. Select either All Configurations or the ones you want to use

  4. Configuration Properties → NMake → Additional Options

  5. Enter: /Yu and press OK or Apply.

  6. Wait until the ‘working’ symbol goes away, the intellisense should be much faster now.

Thanks for the replay! Should I do this on my project or the UE4 project under the same solution?

I’ve been putting it under my own project. Not sure what difference putting it in the UE4 project would make if any.

Isn’t the longer times caused by processing the large amounts of headers in the UE4 project?

I tried using this option as well /Yu and the issue of, when I change one of my own header (.H) files, intellisense (intellistupid), is still going through all header files of the engine, which I have never changed.

Yeah. You can put them in either, I was more saying I’ll not aware of any drawbacks from putting them in your own.

I haven’t had any issue myself, but you can try adding it to the properties for UE4 instead of your own project. Both have worked fine for me, it might solve it for you.

This is a old post, but I thought I would comment my solution anyways. I found out that Microsoft Security Essentials (Windows Defender) slows down Intellisense and make it generally unusable or at least painfully slow. To solve the problem you can add an Exception processes to Security Essentials, which makes MSE not to monitor behaviour of those processes.

To add exception process, go to:

Microsoft Security Essentials → Excluded processes → Browse → Find the devenv.exe or WDExpress.exe from your computer → Press Add button → Press Save Changes

I also added some other Visual C++ processes such as vcpkgsrv.exe and cl.exe as exceptions. After reboot intellisense ran so smooth I think I’ve had this problem all the time but it wasn’t so severe I didn’t really need to fix anything.

Hope this helps someone who is struggling with painfully slow Intellisense.

(Note: Computer in question had SSD, 3.5GHz dual core CPU and 8GB of RAM.)

Oh man, this just made my day. It makes all the difference in the world, whereas adding /Yu did not seem to do much at all. Thanks for this!

You’re welcome. I still can’t believe it was something that unrelated that made Intellisense completely unusable. Spread the word mate!

hi. don’t know if this is still relevant, but I had the same issue and have found solution (not perfect though). Instead of /Yu you should write /YcYourProjectName.h /YuYourProjectName.h

Note that there is no space between /Yc and name, same for /Yu.

But after that you should use Unreal Editor to compile, because when using Build bttn in VS, there are errors.

p.s. sorry for english.

How do you make it ignore the debug symbols? / sources of the engine?

you rock!!