share
Stack OverflowHow to disable Perfwatson2.exe from Visual Studio
[+356] [3] RickAndMSFT
[2017-03-08 03:28:39]
[ visual-studio visual-studio-2017 ]
[ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42662444/how-to-disable-perfwatson2-exe-from-visual-studio ]

How do I disable Perfwatson in Visual Studio? Perfwatson is not disabled by Tools > Extensions and Updates > Developer Analytics Tools.

[+682] [2017-03-08 03:28:39] RickAndMSFT [ACCEPTED]

For Visual Studio 2022 and the latest version of Visual Studio 2019:

  1. From the help menu, select Privacy > Privacy Settings
  2. In the Visual Studio Experience Improvement Program dialog, select No, I would not like to participate.

Note: You can't opt out in pre-release versions by this mechanism.

For older versions of Visual Studio

  1. From the help menu, select Send Feedback > Settings.
  2. In the Visual Studio Experience Improvement Program dialog, select No, I would not like to participate.

Pressing OK on the dialog will need elevated privileges, and you have to restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

See Visual Studio Customer Experience Improvement Program [1] for the official Microsoft instructions.

This change writes to the registry. See then next answer for fixing directly in the registry.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/visual-studio-experience-improvement-program

(89) Thanks. I disabled this because it took so long to wait for this process to stop when installing extensions. If Microsoft want more people to participate then they should make sure that this process does not take so long to exit. - David S.
(68) Ironically, the users with the slowest experience, who are the one Microsoft most needs data from, are the ones most likely to disable the feedback channel. - Edward Brey
(33) @EdwardBrey - there is a tale of a developer who improved game's FPS by optimising the FPS counter. - Alex
(33) I noticed that whenever I make some dummy VS solution just to test out some code, and then I close down Visual Studio and try to delete the solution folder, Windows complains that the files are in use. I have to wait about 30 seconds before I am able to delete the folder. When I check running processes I can see that devenv.exe is terminated on exit. But not this child process called PerfWatson2.exe. Now that I have disabled this option, it no longer starts with Visual Studio, and when I exit out of Visual Studio I can easily delete the folder. So thank you for sharing this tip! - Samir
(18) Whoot! Disabling this speeds up VS2017 with 10 seconds! - Michel
(3) Wow, this had a huge affect on how fast VS2017 loaded. Maybe it's a conflict with antivirus or something but measuring performance greatly reduced performance for me. - N Jones
(2) This smashes my hard drive and CPU. Makes VS lag a lot. - rollsch
(25) "Participatino will not degrade the performance of your software". Yeah, right... - Carra
(2) Note that you have to have a Project open for the "Send Feedback" item to be in the Help menu, at least in Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017, Version 15.5.6 - Clare Macrae
(1) and for good measure, delete C:\Windows\Installer\$PatchCache$\Managed\E31ADFC6843AB51328‌​A006B3CBDB6748\14.0.‌​23107\PerfWatson2.ex‌​e along with all the log files littered in multiple places under C:\Users\%USERID%\Local Settings - smirkingman
(2) Thx. I suspected that it was writing hundreds of MB's to my temp folder making Visual Studio unresponsive. - gast128
(2) This program absolutely smashes my disk doing 200mb/s reads at times lagging everything out, - rollsch
I tried here but the "OK" just don't do anything. Guess I need to be logged as admin, but I don't have it's access. :( - Iúri dos Anjos
And I thought VS was crap compared to Xamarin, silly me. - Nick Turner
(1) Interesting enough, I would have issues opening projects when VS starts, ending in VS crashing. I disabled this add-on (via the answer) and guess what? VS opens/loads projects immediately - Rob Scott
(2) visual studio 2019, still the same issue... ironically its making visual studio freeze for me every time because it takes 100% disk usage. had to disable it to be able to work..i actually cant believe the amount of performance i got out of disabling it! - Niklas
(2) Send Feedback > Settings That should really be under Tools > Options > Feedback. - tsilb
(3) For me, this option was under Visual Studio 2019's 'Help > Privacy > Privacy Settings' menu. - quaabaam
(1) Disabling that option just sent my SSD from 100% utilization to 4% so must disable it! - James
Thank you so much! It's consuming huge disk usage and causing a 100% utilization - Morris Li
Thanks! This would fill up my disk, causing severe system slowdowns. I have 1.25 TB free disk space, and this would consume all of it after leaving my pc on for a few days. - Inrego
1
[+31] [2018-10-05 19:21:49] Johan Lundberg

You can do it via the registry. For a 64 bit OS, the key is at 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM

And for a 32 bit OS, at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM

For Group Policy management (settings from IT department), it's

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\VisualStudio\SQM

The key name is OptIn (a DWORD), and you need to set it to 0 to disable.

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/visual-studio-experience-improvement-program

To set it automatically

(On a 64 bit OS machine not managed by a group policy), fire up an admin command prompt and just

REG ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM  /v OptIn /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

You may have to close and restart all visual studio related processes (or reboot) for the change to bite.


(1) In VS 2019, the path was updated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\1‌​6.0\SQM - 8ctopus
i did this but the perfwatson2 keep running on taskeng.exe - gumuruh
2
[+2] [2024-03-11 15:31:06] Dragodraki

Seems like Microsoft follows a constant line here. Whoever is interested in the patch for several versions of VS, here comes the ready patch. Copy the content into notepad, save it as *.reg file and execute.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

; Visual Studio uses PerfWatson2.exe to track the app behavior by default.
; Annoying: Each time closing a VS project it lasts about additional 1 minute for Visual Studio to close it.
; Until then you aren't able to delete/edit the source files and in general VS acts very slow with it!
; With this patch it bans PerfWatson2.exe for the sake of privacy matters and extreme much better workflow.
; Should work for Visual Studio 2017, 2019, 2022 (both x86 and x64)

; Visual Studio 2017
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM]
"OptIn"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM]
"OptIn"=dword:00000000

; Visual Studio 2019
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\16.0\SQM]
"OptIn"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSCommon\16.0\SQM]
"OptIn"=dword:00000000

; Visual Studio 2022
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\17.0\SQM]
"OptIn"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSCommon\17.0\SQM]
"OptIn"=dword:00000000

Would being very bold I could imagine for the next version VS 2024 us of able to patch it forward in adding an entry with number +1 = 18.0, if Microsoft would continue their own logic):

; Likely Future - no guarantee here:
; Visual Studio 2024
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\18.0\SQM]
"OptIn"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSCommon\18.0\SQM]
"OptIn"=dword:00000000

3