As far as I know, the ".vs" folder is designed to store user settings for the project. Previously, in Visual Studio 2015, this folder weighed up to 10mb, but as soon as I updated to 2017, the viewer’s folder size (in the same project) began to occupy more than 400 Mb. And so in all other projects. Even if you create a completely clean project, the .vs folder already weighs up to 20 MB.

The question is: If this is a bug, then how to fix it? If this is not a bug, is it possible to customize the volume of this folder?

  • I do not observe this. In most of my projects, it does not even reach 1MB, the largest size is 1.3 MB. What do you have in it? - VTT
  • Here is a link to an almost empty project: github.com/MihailYa/Rubish As far as I understand, the size of the project directly depends on how many files I added to the precomilled header (stdafx.h) I added to stdafx.h #include <fstream> And .vs file size increased by 20MB But why in 2015 the visual has almost no effect on the size of this folder? - Mihail Ya

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You have an intellisense database stored in your .vs folder. This can be turned off by setting in the studio settings tab Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Advanced -> Fallback Location option Always use Fallback Location to True and the option Do not Warn If Fallback Location Used to True . In this group, there is still a third option that allows you to specify a specific location for this data (by default, they fall into temp, it seems). After that, close the studio (all) and delete the .vs folder. The next time you start the studio, it will re-create the base for intellisense in the new location, and in the .vs folder .vs will be only a small .suo file. In addition, if you add a .vs folder to the repository, .vs should exclude it anyway.

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  • Thank you very much, the project has just become easier by 2 Gb! ;) - Mihail Ya

The .vs folder is not only for user preferences, but generally for storing all sorts of supporting data. At a minimum, the IntelliSens ʻa index is cached there. In previous versions, the studio created, for its own needs, separate files in the solution folder, now it’s probably decided to dump it into a separate folder so that there is less mess.

There is no explicit special setting for the volume of the .vs folder in the studio. This is hardly a mistake.