<p>I find that quite often Visual Studio memory usage will average ~150-300 MB of RAM.</p>

<p>As a developer who very often needs to run with multiple instances of Visual Studio open, are there any performance tricks to optimize the amount of memory that VS uses?</p>

<p>I am running VS 2005 with one add-in (TFS)</p>

From
this blog post
:
[...]
These changes are all available from the Options dialog (Tools –> Options):
Environment
General
:
Disable “Animate environment tools”
Documents
:
Disable “Detect when file is changed outside the environment”
Keyboard
:
Remove the F1 key from the Help.F1Help command
Help\Online
:
Set “When loading Help content” to “Try local first, then online” or “Try local only, not online”
Startup
:
Change the “At startup” option to “Show empty environment”
Projects and Solutions
General
:
Disable “Track Active Item in Solution Explorer”
Text Editor
General
(for each language you want):
Disable “Navigation bar” (this is the toolbar that shows the objects and procedures drop down lists allowing you to choose a particular object in your code.
Disable “Track changes”
Windows Forms Designer
General
:
Set “AutotoolboxPopulate” to false.
Set “EnableRefactoringOnRename” to false.