Performance Issues Driving Me to VSCode
I have been using Webstorm and Intellij Idea for a few years now. I do really like many aspects of the product.
However, the performance issues have never been resolved. I lived with them for a while, but they have gotten so bad that it breaks my workflow all the time. Often when I try to type the entire IDE freezes. It is just too frustrating.
I am on a Mac and I do mostly JavaScript Web development. I have tried increasing the memory in my configuration and have tried excluding directories from indexing. I'm not sure what else to do. I think the problem is related to indexing of my project files, but I'm not sure.
I think if you try to do some real JavaScript project work on a large project it will be obvious. In any case, VSCode is free and pretty good so I have to do that to recover my productivity for the time being. I really do hope you can address these issues since I think you will start to lose a lot of market share otherwise. It should be a priority for you to address them. I will come back if you do. Thanks.
Peter
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Please refer to https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/articles/207241235. Report performance problems at https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/IDEA with the CPU snapshots attached so that we can fix them.
I struggle with this too - and I've reported my snapshots - and it has got a bit better, but there is something amiss. I've just download 2017.1.5 which mentions some js improvements - here's hoping.
This is not something that can be diagnosed and fixed using screen captures. It is not some subtle edge case that only shows up here and there. I have seen this behavior on several different Mac OS development machines and operating systems.
To reproduce you only need to find a large JS project and try to work on it. It seems very likely to be the indexing functionality that is the culprit.
I am assuming that indexing is run in a different process. The algorithm for indexing must be very processor intensive because it consumes a lot CPU resources, 3-400% on occasion. Obviously, there is something wrong with Mac OS too if it cannot at least be responsive to input during these spikes. This is not my area of expertise.
Perhaps there is a pragmatic solution that would improve overall UX without addressing the really tough underlying performance issues. For example, it might be better to index in small chunks over a longer period of time. I would be much more tolerant of a missing index and feedback that occurs just when I attempt to jump to a declaration - rather than be interrupted while typing.
We are not asking for the screen captures, CPU profiler snapshot records IDE activity and helps to find out why it's slow.
Sure notepad will performs better!