Scroll lag happening recently
I'm not sure what changed, but now scrolling is laggy in PHPStorm. The frame rate has gone down, it's slower... sometimes it works as expected. I can't tell what the problem is. This happened in years past, I don't know why it's popping up again.
I'm using macOS Ventura 13.2.1 and PHPStorm 2022.3.2. I can't tell if it started with any update, but I generally keep things up to date.
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It is uneasy to say what is actually happening in your installation without logs but could you please try to disable the Metal rendering and check if it helps?
To disable it, please add the following line to "Help > Edit Custom VM Options:
PHPStorm uses a "custom VM"? What does that mean?
I added the line and restarted, and files are scrolling smoothly now!
Why did that make a difference?!
Thanks for the update.
This option actually disables the Metal Framework rendering. Technically, it should improve performance over the OpenGL, here is a ticket for its implementation:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-745
However, there are still cases where situation is quite the opposite and Metal rendering shows bad UI performance instead. This ticket looks pretty similar to your scenario:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-4597
You may subscribe to the ticket to get updates on its progress and keep Metal rendering disabled for now.
Just wanted to add that disabling metal rendering fixed this issue for me.
I tried everything over the last few weeks with my M2 Pro Mac mini. As of today (October 2025), disabling metal was the only thing that helped getting PhpStorm to run with acceptable performance!
Thank you so much Vasiliy Yur!