IDEA is very very slow

Please submit a performance problem at https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/IDEA with the logs (https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/articles/207241085) and with the CPU snapshot (https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/articles/207241235).

Hello Serge, thank you for your reply.

If IDEA was a free / open source product I'd gladly help with the debugging.

But it's a commercial product and I've been a proud paying customer for a couple of years now, because it's a great product. But being a commercial solution means I need to fire it up and it needs to work.

I abandoned Eclipse years ago because of this exact same problem: it began to be unbearably slow. You guys had the fastest IDE on the market, the most stable one.

What happened? It's not about sending logs and debugging my installation, it's about JetBrains figuring out where it turned wrong, I think it was from 2014 to now or somewhere around there. In 2013 I clearly remember IDEA being lightning fast for me.

For larger HTML files it becomes impossible to work - impossible....you open a tag and it sits there for seconds.... I'm using EMACS in parallel with IDEA for this....

So please take this as constructive criticism, whatever you guys added to 2016 and 2015 versions needs to be reviewed. I'm sorry I can't be sending you logs and helping out, I wish I could, but I think it's something structural you guys changed 3 to 4 years ago and you have a great team that can figure it out.

Regards,

Jose Fonseca

Every performance problem is unique, it's completely normal for a paying customer to submit a CPU snapshot so that the problem can be investigated and fixed. No product is perfect.

You are welcome to submit a ticket to support here if you are more comfortable with that rather than using an issue tracker.

which processor is optimal for phpstorm2017 or idea2017?

1 intel g4620 (two cores, four streams)

2 amd fx8350 (eight cores, eight threads)

Our products can fully utilize multiple cores when performing indexing. So, 8 cores would probably provide better indexing times (considering your I/O subsystem would not be a bottleneck, so fast SSD is also recommended).

Product is the slowest IDE I've ever used, on multiple machines. As we speak it has redlined at 600% CPU for twenty minutes, after restarting. this i crazy. switching to VSCode with proper plugins.

There is nothing wrong with utilizing 600% CPU on a multicore system. It either takes longer time and utilizes less CPU, or it uses all the available resources and performs indexing faster.

I absolutely agree with Jfonseca 

Especially Idea 2017 is super slow even compared with Idea 2016 version.

Slow typing, slow startup, slow compiling and debugging. I like a lot jetbrains products and the company I work for also prefer to work with jetbrains products but in recent years it is getting worse and worse in speed. I appreciate the new functionality/frameworks support etc.. that was added in recent years but if it is slow, nobody will be able to use them.

Please jetbrains, investigate the performance issues more then just adding new features

We can help only if you provide a CPU snapshot: https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/articles/207241235.

There could be some customized JVM option you are using that affects the performance or it could be a hundred of other possible cases. We can't guess why it's slow for you unless you provide the requested data. Hint: no, it's not slow for all and in some cases it's a problem with user environment or JVM configuration.

Serge, I have a clean installation of Mac OS X running Java HotSpot 1.8.0_121. It is the latest Macbook Pro 2016 with highest specs.

I just increased the memory in JVM options

# custom IntelliJ IDEA VM options

-Xms1024m
-Xmx6144m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=240m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops

What can be wrong?

Wrong JVM options is just one of the hundreds of possible cases. To tell what's the problem in your specific case we need to analyze the CPU snapshot recorded on your system. We can waste more time guessing or we can check the snapshot and suggest something. Please contact support with the requested file attached via https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/requests/new or file a performance problem at https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/IDEA.

Blindly increasing the heap size is also not always good since it can increase GC pauses.

> Please jetbrains, investigate the performance issues more then just adding new features

We fix dozens of performance problems per month, check this link (it's just a fraction of the performance problems fixed since there are also tickets in other projects that are part of IntelliJ IDEA codebase).

Serge,

I'm with Jfonseca and xvitcoder and everybody else that is complaining about performance.  It's such a common overarching problem across the product that is rendering it close to useless.

Asking for a CPU snapshot for every posting in this thread is equally useless.  It's blindingly obvious that the product has become close to atrocious when you type into a code editor and there is a delay of several seconds before it displays the characters on the screen.

If you want to provide any sort of value to clients I suggest you escalate this to whoever in the JetBrains hierarchy has the brain (no pun intended) to stop being in denial and fix the damn thing or start losing clients very rapidly.

I challenge you to not respond with a comment about needing the CPU snapshot but rather that the problems are being escalated as a matter of urgency with a view to releasing the fixes ASAP. 

Thanks

Appreciate your input, however I'm not sure what exactly to escalate and to whom. As a developer, you should understand that in order for the problem to be fixed, it has to be either reproduced or the data needed to isolate it is provided from the system where this problem can be reproduced. Put yourself on the place of JetBrains developers. User complains about poor performance, but on your system and with your projects everything works just fine. User doesn't provide you any data about this performance problem. How would you fix it?

What to escalate: The fact that customers are complaining loudly about woeful product performance.

Who to escalate to: People in JetBrains that would be concerned about these complaints.  I would suggest for you to speak to whoever you report to as a starting point.  You should alert them that there is a general dissatisfaction with the product.  You should *not* keep this to yourself in a personal battle between you and the customers in this thread.

I appreciate the need to reproduce the problem but if JetBrains developers don't see the problem then I would suggest there is a big gap between their usage and that of the general development community.

Personally I installed the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA from the official download page and imported the code base for my client's project.  There is one Gradle java project with six modules with an average of 100 classes in each and associated dependencies.  This is not an unusually large project in my experience.  I have not modified the configured plugins in any way.

How I would fix it: As part of development or testing processes, simulate large projects with significant dependencies to external libraries, applications/processes running within IntelliJ in debug mode, and then run a profiler to see where the bottle necks may be.  I would be astounded if this isn't being done in some way already but if you are unable to replicate the problems then like I said before, there is a big disconnect between what you do internally and what the rest of us do.

All the developers are aware that the product can have performance problems. There are dozens of performance problems reported and fixed at https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/IDEA every month.

> I appreciate the need to reproduce the problem but if JetBrains developers don't see the problem then I would suggest there is a big gap between their usage and that of the general development community.

That is true, there are thousands of possible configurations that potentially can cause issues and that will be never used locally at JetBrains. That is why we have a public issue tracker and the instructions how these problems can be properly reported in order to be fixed.

It's also a matter of hardware and software configuration. Certain combinations can cause problems (like 4K external display on Mac with non-native resolution). We don't have all the possible hardware and software configurations in the world to isolate the issues locally.

Getting a CPU snapshot and reporting a problem at https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/IDEA is a matter of 5 minutes.

> Personally I installed the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA from the official download page and imported the code base for my client's project.  There is one Gradle java project with six modules with an average of 100 classes in each and associated dependencies.  This is not an unusually large project in my experience.  I have not modified the configured plugins in any way.

How do we know that the problem you have is not something that is already reported and being worked on? How do we know that it's not already fixed in the master branch? Maybe there is already or workaround or a solution for your problem, but we can't help you because we don't know which specific problem you have unless you provide the requested data.

> How I would fix it: As part of development or testing processes, simulate large projects with significant dependencies to external libraries, applications/processes running within IntelliJ in debug mode, and then run a profiler to see where the bottle necks may be.  I would be astounded if this isn't being done in some way already but if you are unable to replicate the problems then like I said before, there is a big disconnect between what you do internally and what the rest of us do.

Of course we do test IntelliJ IDEA with large open source projects, but there would be always bottlenecks that are specific only to some projects, hardware and software configurations that cannot be tested and reproduced locally.

> Who to escalate to: People in JetBrains that would be concerned about these complaints.  I would suggest for you to speak to whoever you report to as a starting point.  You should alert them that there is a general dissatisfaction with the product.  You should *not* keep this to yourself in a personal battle between you and the customers in this thread.

The first questions from any developer would be: Is there a CPU snapshot available? Is there a reproducible test case? Until this information is provided, there is nothing to escalate.

It's been 8 months since I opened this case, I have since upgraded to a new and much better workstation (as if the last one was bad for coding) and IDEA is still slow for HTML files, especially a bit larger HTML and XML. Play Framework templates, based on HTML are also very slow.

The code navigation does not work on Ubuntu Linux. Ctrl+Alt+Left conflicts with Unity. I've switched to XFCE and the code navigation does not work either, I have to use the toolbar button with the mouse in order to go back and forth.

I've been using an external editor for HTML templates (VS Code) in the meantime.

> It's been 8 months since I opened this case

You posted a message to a public forum and didn't provide the information we asked for that could help us to investigate and fix it. Proper cases are opened via support at https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/requests/new or at YouTrack at https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/IDEA. If you provide the data we ask for, our developers will look into the problem and see what can be done to address it or the support team will suggest some setting/workaround.

> You posted a message to a public forum and didn't provide the information we asked for that could help us to investigate and fix it.

I can't debug your product for you, unfortunately. I'm too busy keeping up with my own bugs.

You don't debug it, you spend 1-5 minutes to provide the data and we investigate, debug and hopefully fix it. That is not much harder than posting to a forum.

I understood that part, Serge. Thank you.

My anti-virus software has On-Access scan. It helps when it is disabled.

Also, changing max memory size for the ideaj process is something to be considered.

I agree again with Jfonseca.. switched over from Netbeans cause IntelliJ was fantastic in comparison, in every way. I've recommended it to so many of my colleagues. I'm considering switching back.. version after version is slower and slower. Some things just take an age, specifically code error highlighting for me.

Just went from a Java project to a Scala project. IntelliJ with Scala is barely usable. 

CPU ranges from upper 100s to about 400. 

It seems odd to me that I haven't had these issues in any JetBrains IDE except when using a language that is a direct competitor to JetBrains Kotlin. It seems like others have sent some of the necessary info to your team. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/SCL-12045?query=scala

What gives?

I notice that my support requests on this forum are "down voted" which is amusing, actually. As a paying customer you ask for help and get downvoted LOL. "I don't like this support ticket so buzz off" LOL.

@Jfronseca, I'm a paying customer of IntelliJ, and have been for years, but it's stupid to think saying "Hey, it's running slow for me!" is a valid bug report.  It's not unreasonable for them to ask for a CPU snapshot or other information to diagnose the problem for you.  You're obviously a web developer.  How would you feel if a user reported, "Hey, the website sucks!" but didn't give you the proper information for you to actually do something about it?