Performance getting worse with each release
I'm wondering if I'm alone here because I've used IDEA since version 4 and at this point I'm very close to uninstalling IDEA.
For reference, one of the projects I work on includes 220,906 files and 47,505 folders. In version 8 the initial indexing took a very long time but once it was complete the IDE was generally very fast and features such as the project window, refactoring and autocomplete all worked very well. The only pain was when IDEA needed the occasional restart once every few days or weeks.
With 9 the occasional pain from indexing was better, however everything else which was arguably far more important was more painful. It seems our pain points lie in things that would use indexes, like autocomplete, refactoring and the CTRL+N/CTRL+SHIFT+N (I've been using it so long I don't remember what it's called, I just remember hot keys). With 10, and in particular 10.5, it's become virtually unusable. Startup is extremely fast but the autocomplete quite often locks up for so long that we give up on waiting on it. Likewise opening a package in the project window also often results in a lockup for several seconds or even minutes if we have not touched that package recently.
I see this across multiple machines and projects. The small projects work well with all the features, anything large and it's quickly becoming unusable as an IDE where it worked perfectly fine (after a long startup) as recently as version 8. I've tried a myriad of VM options along with both the Sun JDK and the JRockit JDK.
Any suggestions are welcome...
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The Geany text editor is able to let you type in realtime in a file of 170k lines of code containing the combination of html, css and javascript in that file, and can syntax-highlight each portion accordingly (css as css etc) without problems as if it's just what it naturally does. Saving or (re)loading the file takes as long as the disk requires to handle such a file, which is a few seconds. When something external changes the file on disk, Geany immediately discovers that and offers to reload it.
IntelliJ has a lag of a second while typing letters in a file of just 10k lines of html, and whenever saving a file no matter how small it is, IntelliJ doesn't respond to anything for 5 seconds, and you can see it doing some strange up/down scrolling movements if reloading a file that was changed on disk (after IntelliJ has finally discovered that the file changed on disk at least).
So there's room for improvement imho.
Geany is much less handy to navigate around in projects with many files (no project overview, ctrl+shift+n, ...) and doesn't have neat things like a true split screen, showing the difference of a file against a GIT repository (or other VC systems, like the brue and green bars on the left and the colored filenames), etc... though. And for Java source code there's of course nothing better than IntelliJ. These features I like of IntelliJ. Is it just those features that make it so slow, though?
Refactoring, find class, find file, safe delete, usage search, autocomplete, import class and code inspection are the things that have gone from fast to unusable in the last two versions.
It's not always unusable, just in large projects. Even then sometimes it works... but often it hangs.
Hello Ken,
If the IntelliJ IDEA UI is unresponsive for more than 5 seconds, it logs
thread dumps in the log directory. If you could submit them as a YouTrack
issue at http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/ we could investigate the reason for
the poor performance and either fix it or recommend something to you that
would improve the performance.
In IDEA 10.5, you can find the log directory using the Help | Reveal Logs
action.
--
Dmitry Jemerov
Development Lead
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"
The thread dumps are 30MB in 424 files for the last two weeks alone. Do you want all of those?
P.S. And apparently some of what I'm experience does not generate thread dumps. I just tried to open a few packages in the project window that I haven't looked at in quite a while. It hung for 8-11 seconds on both but I see no new thread dumps.
http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEA-71530
Hello Ken,
Let's start with the ones from a single run.
--
Dmitry Jemerov
Development Lead
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"
I feel the same, although I experience the same with a much smaller project (2500-3000 files, mostly Java some JSPs). I hope the CPU snapshots sent to Jetbrains by all the IDEA users render some result.
PS: The same kind of discussion: http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5311732
On Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:20:52 MSD, Peter Heijnen
<no_reply@jetbrains.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :
>I feel the same, although I experience the same with a mouch smaller project size (2500-3000 files, mostly Java some JSPs). I hope the CPU snapshots sent to Jetbrains by all the IDEA users render some result.
This is the nature of software. more features slows it down. The
question is, what can you do to hardware to beef up performance.
e.g.
more RAM
and SSD see http://mindprod.com/bgloss/ssd.html
a new motherboard/cpu
bigger monitor -- so you can show more without scrolling.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
One thing I love about having a website, is that when I complain about
something, I only have to do it once. It saves me endless hours of grumbling.
I use IDEA on several systems here and am using a fast SSD (OCZ Vertex) and 6GB of RAM on some of them. Setting the IDEA heap size to very large amounts (e.g. >2GB) is not recommended by Jetbrains and my experience confirms this. Having multiple CPU's has no effect either. So I don't think this is the solution we should be looking for.
My monitors are large enough, but anyway, are you seriously suggesting that we should add monitors to prevent scrolling through sources? I've never heard that one before.
And regarding the features: I think that normal code navigation and editing should be fast regardless of all the other features being added.
Hello Peter,
Many of the performance problems are specific to a particular project configuration.
If you want to be sure that we fix the problem that you, and not some other
IDEA user, are experiencing, please submit your own CPU shapshot.
--
Dmitry Jemerov
Development Lead
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"
Indeed. I submitted logs and what not through YouTrack and it is now listed as fixed. Apparently it was something to do with the JSPs in our source folders.
Waiting for the next bug fix release to see if it solves our problems.
Peter, you can run multiple idea instances as independent processes. say 3 ideas with 1gb of heap each. Just edit idea.properties. This will make hardware utilization better.
I do see significant performance changes when I disable the JSP plugin. With the plugin enabled, inspections take much longer (while editing Java files). I hope the fix you mentioned improves things for me aswell.
PS: I like the EAP a lot! I can live with EAP builds that don't work for me as I can simply revert to the last EAP build that worked fine.
PS2: I also like that fact that Jetbrains does respond quickly to issues and messages.
Make sure you report your final results, good or bad.