Calling "npm ls -g" several times when the solution opens is making the system slow

[giggio]

When you open a ASP.NET 5 project in Visual Studio 2015 it will call npm ls -g once for each project on the solution, even if there is no package.json on the .xproj directory. This command is not cheap at all and imposes a heavy burden on the development machine.
You need to figure out a way to do whatever you are doing in a way that impacts less the system. Right now Visual Studio simply becomes unusable until all the commands finish, and the whole system becomes really slow. I am experiencing 100% CPU usage going of for minutes on a Surface Pro 3 with i5 and 8GB RAM.

[davidfowl]

/cc @barrytang @jodavis

[davidfowl]

@giggio You're using VS 2015 RTM right?

[giggio]

@davidfowl Yes, but this has being going on for a while. It was an issue already on RC.
I was looking into it right now, and I am not sure it is exactly one instance per project. I do know it is a lot of instances, and it seems that the larger the solution, the more processes are opened.

[jodavis]

@giggio Thanks for bringing this to our attention. There shouldn't be any calls to npm for a project that doesn't have a package.json. However, it looks like there could be multiple calls for a single project that does have one, especially if packages are being restored when the project opens. The module we use to get package status keeps detecting changes and re-checking status. I will look for ways to reduce this impact.

[giggio]

@jodavis I think you are correct. And I have noticed that whenever I install a package that this also happens. I try not to even touch package.json with VS open at this moment, because my machine gets so slow.
It would be nice maybe to have an option to turn off this package management smarts on VS. I usually manage this things on the command line, this is making me work slower.

[barrytang]

TFS#1204168

[cobywhite]

This isn't just limited to asp.net 5. I get this problem in Visual Studio 2015 in a asp.net 4 project.

[giggio]

Ok, I wrote a quick tool to fix this. It kills any Node processes spawn by VS: https://github.com/giggio/killvsnode
You can install it by running dnu commands install killvsnode.

[giggio]

Problem persists. This is really annoying. How is this coming?

[llehn]

I have the same problem. It appeared when I switched from the npm which is installed by the tooling to npm 3:
All was fine with beta7 tooling. Then I rearranged the order of external web tools to have $(PATH) as first. I have npm 3 installed in path. Then VS started spawning countless "npm ls -g", effectively almost killing my system.

[kidchenko]

I have too.

[giggio]

Problem also happens with Node Tools for Visual Studio. :(

[mykohsu]

Is there any improvement to this? I have a solution with one project and a few npm gulp modules. There are over 80 executions of npm ls -g in 3 minutes of opening the solution. This can sometimes go on for hours.