Extreme lag and high CPU usage on OSX High Sierra

Applications can only call the OS for nearly all of their functionality. That is the whole point of an OS. In this case, I'm pointing the finger directly at Apple, because:

- Using the same version of Intellij Idea, it is unusable in High Sierra, but works great in Sierra

- In High Sierra, it is unusable when I have an external 4k display attached, but when I disconnect the display, or drop the resolution, it works fine.

- In High Sierra, I see the same performance issue when watching videos in Chrome.

I have become less enamored of Apple over the past 3 years or so. OSX is getting long in the tooth, and Apple seems to have stopped caring about older systems. I hate to say it, but it reminds me a lot of the performance issues and bloat seen in MS Windows. 

Sad.

Dustin, I see what you're saying, but it's irrelevant in my humble opinion. Every other application runs just fine on High Sierra except PhpStorm. If they claim to support OS X then that means they have to make it run smoothly on that OS. This is clearly not the case as many users are complaining about the same problem. Besides that this isn't new to High Sierra, I've been a PhpStorm user for several years and performance has been a recurring issue.

I feel cheated for having to try to figure out how to make PhpStorm work smoothly every time there's a product or OS update. I pay for this product to make my life easier not harder.

I have the same problem on my old MacBook pro (latest 2011, Core i5, 16GB RAM, SSD), but it's begun when i installed Vuejs plugin and enabled ESLint spellchecker. If i disable it PyCharm works fine.

I experienced something like the symptoms described here and found this thread. The comments did not address my problem.

I am using PyCharm Professional 2018.1  #PY181.4445.76 on an MBP 2013 with 16GB RAM, macOS Sierra 10.12.6

Activity monitor shows PyCharm pegged at 400% CPU once it opens a project.

In my case, I had 2 projects open. The CPU issue only affected one of the projects. Whenever I closed it, the CPU usage dropped.

I should note that I was modifying the virtualenv associated with the project before this issue happened -- that's not to say that is the cause here, because regardless the case, the IDE shouldn't crumble when possibly a virtualenv is modified. I removed the existing virtualenv, and recreated it. I may or may not have been doing this while PyCharm was running. I have also tried closing and restarting PyCharm with no effect after this issue started.

In the end I resolved it by deleting the .idea folder in that project. I probably won't bother debugging this issue further but I hope it helps someone else.

Well, here I am at Mojave, short after making fun of my friends macbook with 8gb ram gone obsolete. He was struggling with this issues for some time (being on high sierra), and I did not believe him.

Now i've upgraded my MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012) i7 @ 16GB straight from sierra to mojave aaaand now i'm having the same issue. I've tried the font trick and it makes things slightly better, the app is usable, but it's still not the same silence, fans are whirring frequently.

So i'm supporting an opinion that crappy OS updates are still JetBrains problem, if we are paying a subscribtion fee for a product, such things should be fixed ASAP.

Hi, I am the one friend with Mid 2014 MacBook Pro i5 8GB from previous comment. I really do have problems with PHPStorm performance since I upgrade my OS X to High  Sierra. Font trick did help, but not so much. So please, do something about it.

UI is extremely laggy after update to Mojave. Tried font trick - no result.

Please capture a CPU snapshot while reproducing the lag for ~1-3 minutes & upload to our FTP. Here's an article about it: https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/articles/207241235-Reporting-performance-problems

@Dimitry Tronin 

I have performed a CPU snapshot with Rider 2017.2.3 running on Macbook Pro 2015 with Movave OS.

Extreme lags can be observed when scrolling the files with touchbar. I uploaded the file through your http service. The name of the file is:

RD-182.4231.496_wilczarz_10.11.2018_09.41.48.zip

How can I follow up on this issue?

Tom

Hi,

please allow me to join the club:

On my MBP (Intel i9, 32GB, Radeon Pro 560X) simple scrolling through Java source code in IntelliJ immediately brings my GPU up to 100% (according to the GPU perf monitor in MacOs Activity Monitor). Scrolling is ok, but not as smooth as in Safari for example.

As soon as IntelliJ runs some background activity like re-indexing and the status bar shows the re-indexing wheel, the GPU jumps up to 100%. So the only screen activity on the entire system is just the re-indexing wheel in the status bar and this is sufficient to max out the most powerful built-in MBP-GPU Apple currently sells.

While such background activity is being displayed, text scrolling becomes laggy. I assume, this is because the GPU is already fully busy displaying the re-indexing wheel. Which sounds like a bug ... in IntelliJ, in JVM, in Mojave ... somewhere.

I cannot tell when this has started, but I am pretty sure the problem already existed at least on HighSierra.

Any help appreciated,
Christian

Full details:
* MacOS 10.14.1
* MBP 2018 Intel i9, 32GB, Radeon Pro 560X 
* Dual 4K screens, both in medium scaled mode (HiDPI); IntelliJ runs only on one of them
* IntelliJ IDEA 2018.2.5 (Ultimate Edition)
Build #IU-182.4892.20, built on October 16, 2018
JRE: 1.8.0_152-release-1248-b19 x86_64
JVM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM by JetBrains s.r.o
.. no change if I use the latest Oracle JVM

* Extra comments: Changing the display to native resolution or turning off HiDPI (using SwitchResX) results in the index wheel only eating 25% to 30% of GPU and scrolling is smoother. But text is too small (native resolution) or badly anti-aliased (non-HiDPI).

I discovered an explanation for my laggy behavior with my MacBook pro 2014 with nVidia graphics card under High Sierra or Mojave. Apparently MacOS uses Metal as the graphics API in Sierra. This is fully supported by the nVidia graphics card. However, starting with High Sierra and continuing in Mojave, they use the Metal 2 graphics API. This is supported by the Intel iris and Radeon chipsets, but the nVidia card in the high-end MacBook pro 2014 models does not have full Metal 2 support. For me, this manifests as laggy screen response and high CPU usage when using an external 4k display.

So, in my case anyway, this is not an intelliJ issue, but rather an issue of Apple hardware (nVidia chipset) not fully supporting the newest Apple MacOS (High Sierra, Mojave). That is EXTREMELY disappointing. Fortunately for me, I now have a new MacBook pro, so it is working fine. Not everyone has that luxury, and Apple has left many people out in the cold.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/any-news-about-the-macbook-pro-nvidia-gpu-lag-yet.2088300/

Adding this vm env helped a lot to reduce lag:

-Dsun.java2d.uiScale.enabled=false

However, high CPU usage during resize window is still present, and I see that other non-native apps like Slack cause same high CPU during resize.

I resovled this problem by reducing the extra display resolution.

Pro tip: reducing and disabling things are called "workarounds", not "solutions"

Way too laggy for when the app is just sitting idle, just having it in the background without doing anything casually consumes 20%+ CPU on a latest MBP. This is not normal..

From all the comments here it's obviously not a "one off" problem. If graphics is the problem then let people enable some kind of "ugly" mode whereas it shows lower quality graphics, but the app is not as resource intensive.

Hi ... same problem here. We just get some new displays with (QHD 2.560 × 1.440) ... we scaled the resolution to 1080p HiDPI. Now we have high lags when entering code and the CPU increase. On the internal Display everything is smooth. 

System: MacBook Pro 2015
2,7 GHz Intel Core i5
8GB Memory
Graphics Intel Iris Graphics 6100

2 external Displays: Dell P2418D with 1080 HiDPI

Have the following PHPStorm versions tried:

PhpStorm 2018.3
PhpStorm 2019.1

both with JRE: 11-internal+125 x86_64
and default JRE 8

I hope there will be a solution soon. Can't work properly. :(

I had the same issue. I updated to 2018.3.5 and disabled material theme plugin. Now my CPU is back to normal. It looks like the material theme has big issues.

Same here :(

MacOS Sierra with Webstorm 2019.1

Happens when I turn laptop on from sleep and connect external display

@Victor: that's a new unrelated issue: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-210361

This is an issue with High Sierra and Metal 2. I've been having this for over an year and not with just IntelliJ products. It always happens after the first lid closing after a fresh restart. Also happens if you connect an external monitor and disconnect it. Hardware acceleration turns off for some apps I think. No wonder. With Apple basically trying to throw OpenGL under the rug. I guess it's not just Apple. Everyone else does this as well but they still support OpenGL. Apple doesn't. It's also rumoured to be removed in 2020. Anyway, if you reduce transparency and motion in the macOS accessibility settings, the issue gets slightly less annoying. The lag is a little less noticeable.

@Paul-Sebastian yes exactly, for me as soon as the nvidia card has been used once, it begins to lag, even if the intel card is used again. But it's only visible when using the mac intensively. So it does it with phpstorm, but also with photoshop only for instance.

(You can check which card is being used with gfxcardstatus.)

Anyway, installing the graphic drivers from nvidia (it also installs a "nvidia driver manager") fixed the problem for me. 

I'm using high sierra too, maybe it's fixed in the last osx version?

I also highly suspect that this forum thread relates to several different problems.

Same issues with macbook pro 2017 and intellij ulti 2019.1.2 or 2019.1.3 RC on both JBR 8 and 11. And like everyone else here, it only happens with external high resolution (4k here) display. Also if I have multiple intellij windows opened on that screen, then it is even worse, even if that other windows are not visible at all.

I have XPS windows laptop with same CPU and it works much much better on it, even when using integrated graphic card for external 4k display.

I have the same issue with Mojave 10.14.5 in RubyMine 2019.1.2. When I'm in the debug mode CPU is hitting above 150-700% consumption. I'm using MB Pro 2018 with I7, 16GB RAM, and AMD Radeon 555x. IDE is unusable. I recently changed laptop. The previous one was identical but I did not have any issues on that one.

I have these issues, and tracked it down to how many windows of PhpStorm I have open.

I'm running on a mid-2015 macbook pro, with High Sierra:

16GB RAM

2.8 GHz Intel Core i7

AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB
Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

LG 34" curved monitor 

Whenever I have 3,4,5+ windows open with different projects the fan starts going crazy and runs on 100% all the time without ever stopping.

After some time the Mac then also starts lagging really bad, so that I can barely do anything and have to wait until it goes back to normal.

When I close projects and have a max of 1 or 2 open, these issues seem to go away, I am writing currently and my fan is silent and my headaches subsede slowly :)

It's such a shame I was using Webstorm on windows and it was working perfectly, but on mac it is unusable, I need to switch to something alse, because of performance issues

One of our users has a nice collection of different related tips to try: https://stitcher.io/blog/phpstorm-performance-issues-on-osx

I noticed that most problems reported here are for MacBooks.

Would a Mac Mini work better for PHP storm? Has anyone tried using a Mac mini with PHP Storm to see if it performs better?