SSMS takes 10-20 + minutes to open

Question

When I open SSMS, I can l look at see it in Task manager like it is running but it doesn't open for quite some time after that. Sometimes 20 minutes or more.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz 2.21 GHz
Installed RAM 32.0 GB (31.7 GB usable)
Device ID E25A6BDC-123F-41C8-8F88-DEA95A5BF17A
Product ID 00391-90330-00000-AA204
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Edition Windows 10 Pro for Workstations
Version 20H2
Installed on ‎3/‎1/‎2021
OS build 19042.985
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.2020.0

Anyone have a thought?

Answer 1

SSMS 18 talks to microsoft on startup

if you are blocking no us traffic as I was

each time it tries to connect it would delay until the 60s timeout. which based on the time to load iit must try 5 times.

Once I allowed all out for the computer I was using SSMS on, in the firewall, it would came up in less then a minute.

Why does SSMS need to talk to Microsoft so much I don't know

Answer 2

Once I added the computer I was running SSMS on to the allow all out in the firewall SSMS started in 6s from about 3 minutes

Answer 3

For me the slow startup is intermittent (sometimes ~45 seconds, sometimes ~5 seconds) and none of the suggestions in this thread have made a difference. I compared a procmon dump of everything ssms.exe did during a slow startup and a fast startup. During the slow startup it spent 30 seconds making thousands of "QueryEAFile" operations, seemingly one for every .dll file under "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 19\Common7\IDE". During the fast startup there's only 4 "QueryEAFile" operations for some files in "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp".

Supposedly SSMS has a reason for gathering extended attributes on every file in its installation path - I haven't yet found a way to disable this.