Content loading very slowly

I recently moved a monogame 3.5 project from VS2013 on Windows 8.1 to Xamarin Studio on Windows 10. When debugging the program, it used to load very quickly (< 2 sec), but now it takes around 30 seconds to start after building. The culprit seems to be the Content.Load<>() function, but it takes like 4-5 seconds to load a 2kb .png (on an SSD). I have it on a Win 7 machine and it doesn’t have this problem. Any ideas?

Is it possible that Xamarin is the problem?

I’m noticing a huge increase in build times when using VS2017 over VS2015. Several minutes longer, in fact.

There would be other issues at play here. I’ve used VS 2017 a lot recently and have not seen any slowdown in build, launch or runtime performance. Increases by a factor of several minutes would have been picked up a long time ago from the number of devs using VS 2017 with MonoGame.

With Xamarin Studio, are you able to build MonoGame from source and step into or profile the Content.Load() method and find which bit of it is taking the extra time?

Definitely. It’s certainly not an inherent issue with VS2017, it’s just my experience with it. I don’t know what the cause of it is, but I never bothered to do much digging because switching back to VS2015 is fine for me.

My suggestion would be to try building it in VS 2013 if possible to see if it’s an issue with the IDE or not.

In order to find out where the problem was, I built MonoGame.Framework locally and referenced it, but, lo and behold, the loading time problem went away. Everything loaded super fast. So… I guess that solved it enough for me. Thanks!

This is confusing…

But by build do you mean debug or release?

Release should take longer as now you can choose NATIVE compilation [Enabled by default I believe], you can uncheck that in options…