Idea 4.0 performance

"The company I work for has purchased 12 licenses at considerable
expenses." Being a little dramatic aren't we? Tried buying JBuilderX?
$500 a head is chicken scratch compared to $3,500.

Norris Shelton
Sun Certified Java Programmer




Mike wrote:

>I have a small sized J2ee project with around 5,000 java files. Since upgrading to Idea 4.0 I have had nothing but issues with performance. My machine is a P4 (1600) Dell D600 with 512mb ram.
>
>To be specific I have the following problems:
>1. Idea cannot keep up with typing. I type and there is a lag between ALL keystrokes sometimes longer than 1 sec!
>2. Compilation usually fails and I have to restart. Why does Idea insist on recompiling my classes after I get a clean CVS project even though my ant build scripts compile using the debug option? Can't Idea recognize my projects classes are good to go? This rebuild take ~ half an hour and fails 20% of the time.
>3. 4.0 seems flaky. Everything is slow. Project setttings add new source path takes 45 to 60 seconds to bring up the open file dialog!
>4. Not a performance issues but how do you turn off the blatently buggy quote " code complete? Try pasting in a sentance with quotes in it and you will see what I mean. The developer must have been on crack when they implemented this feature.
>
>I have tried netbeans and eclipse using the same project and they have no issues with performance in regards to compilation and typing. Wow imangine being able to type and have a computer keep pace!
>
>The company I work for has purchased 12 licenses at considerable expenses. I am now at the point where I have to consider throwing away our investment and switching to eclipse since it is almost as good as Idea in the feature department but is considerably faster. Idea 4.0 reminds me of my time with Kawa and their last release just before folding as a company. Too many peolple relized the expense was not worth the product over and competing cheaper (or free) IDE's.

>

Hi,

We really will appreciate the project sketch on which you experience
such performance problem.
Mike wrote:

I have a small sized J2ee project with around 5,000 java files. Since upgrading to Idea 4.0 I have had nothing but issues with performance. My machine is a P4 (1600) Dell D600 with 512mb ram.

To be specific I have the following problems:
1. Idea cannot keep up with typing. I type and there is a lag between ALL keystrokes sometimes longer than 1 sec!
2. Compilation usually fails and I have to restart. Why does Idea insist on recompiling my classes after I get a clean CVS project even though my ant build scripts compile using the debug option? Can't Idea recognize my projects classes are good to go? This rebuild take ~ half an hour and fails 20% of the time.
3. 4.0 seems flaky. Everything is slow. Project setttings add new source path takes 45 to 60 seconds to bring up the open file dialog!
4. Not a performance issues but how do you turn off the blatently buggy quote " code complete? Try pasting in a sentance with quotes in it and you will see what I mean. The developer must have been on crack when they implemented this feature.

I have tried netbeans and eclipse using the same project and they have no issues with performance in regards to compilation and typing. Wow imangine being able to type and have a computer keep pace!

The company I work for has purchased 12 licenses at considerable expenses. I am now at the point where I have to consider throwing away our investment and switching to eclipse since it is almost as good as Idea in the feature department but is considerably faster. Idea 4.0 reminds me of my time with Kawa and their last release just before folding as a company. Too many peolple relized the expense was not worth the product over and competing cheaper (or free) IDE's.

--
Best regards,
Maxim Mossienko
IntelliJ Labs / JetBrains Inc.
http://www.intellij.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

ipr

Must be something very specific. I'm working on a very large J2EE project and IDEA project is satisfactory at least.

By the way, I'm working on a Pentium3 800Mhz with 512M of ram. IDEA performance on this machine is not superb, but it's not a problem at all.

single ipr is not enough - all .iml files are also needed.

--
Best regards,
Eugene Zhuravlev
Software Developer
JetBrains Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"


"Mike" <mike@netitup.com> wrote in message news:2712928.1082144335544.JavaMail.javamailuser@localhost...

ipr

Mike wrote:

I have a small sized J2ee project with around 5,000 java files. Since upgrading to Idea 4.0 I have had nothing but issues with performance. My machine is a P4 (1600) Dell D600 with 512mb ram.

Just a thought: have you tried adjusting the amount of memory used by IDEA?
By default, IIRC, it starts with a minimum stack size of 16 MB and a maximum
of either 64 or 128 Mb. If you increase those - if you haven't already - you
should see a noticeable increase in performance. People have also reported
performance increases from tuning the VM's garbage collection options, but
I've never felt the need myself.

In case you don't know, these settings are found in the idea.lax file,
inside your $IDEA_HOME/bin directory. Look for the line which starts with
lax.nl.java.option.additional. These are all the options which get passed to
IDEAs JVM when it starts up.

For reference, I have a 1.1 GHz laptop with 1 Gb of memory running Windows
2000; I use -Xms64m -Xms512m for the memory settings.

Hope that helps,
Vil.
--
Vilya Harvey
vilya.harvey@digitalsteps.com / digital steps /
(W) +44 (0)1483 469 480
(M) +44 (0)7816 678 457 http://www.digitalsteps.com/

-Xms64M -Xmx256M -XX:NewRatio=3

works for me here, on a machine with 512M of main memory. If you're wondering, NewRatio=3 makes the young generation way larger than the default, making young collections less frequent (but they're longer and collect more objects when they occur).

Changing the .lax memory settings helped – thanks! I also stopped running two projects at the same time. Too bad I can't have both running though since 1 is use to help develop the other.

Performance is now acceptable - not great but at least Idea is keeping up with typing most of the time. Strange that Idea 4 would be significantly slower than 3.0 using the same machine and project. With 3.0 I was able to run two servlet (Jboss) based projects at the same time - one with 5,000 files and the other 400. I had no problems with typing or navigating around files regardless of number of their size.

I have turned off local history in 4.0 but I still see messages from time to time from Idea saying something to the effect of updating local history or saving local history – not sure if Idea is lying or I didn’t really turn of local history.

I would still like to find out how to keep incremental compile but not have Idea rebuild my project every time I get a clean build from CVS. Every day I get a clean CVS build of my project then use ant to build it to the same output directory Idea uses. I use the debug option so I am not sure why Idea has to spend the time to rebuild all 5,000 project files?

I could turn off 'make project' before running JBoss with the play button, but them I would lose incremental compile.

thanks
Mike

Strange that Idea 4 would be significantly slower than 3.0 using the same

machine and project.

Maybe you run into swapping issues? We had to update our memory after switch
to 4.0. The old release 3 needed a max. memory setting of 140m, the new 4.0x
needs 192m. We managed to have a requirement of exactly 520m (minimal
swapping) including our started app under development. Now with an
additional amount of 52 megs swapping became quite painful.

Ciao

...Jochen

In article <40802D06.5050603@yahoo.com>,
Norris Shelton <norrisshelton@yahoo.com> wrote:

"The company I work for has purchased 12 licenses at considerable
expenses." Being a little dramatic aren't we? Tried buying JBuilderX?
$500 a head is chicken scratch compared to $3,500.

Not at all dramatic. $6k is a pretty fair piece of change. It is large
enough to be visible, likely over a project manager's "no questions
asked" spending limit, and the kind of thing that can be reviewed to
save money when the inevitable corner cutting meeting happens.

As far as JBuilderX, I have one client that had been fully committed to
Borland for their development, up until the last pricing announcement.
They have gone to Eclipse for the future, though they have no problem
with me using my personal IDEA license.

Scott

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004 21:34:22 +0400, mcrusty wrote:

Changing the .lax memory settings helped ? thanks! I also stopped running
two projects at the same time. Too bad I can't have both running though
since 1 is use to help develop the other.

Could you not add the other as a dependant module of the first?

Hi,

I got exactly the same problems here....
The problem is the EJB support in idea. We use a REALLY big EJB-JAR.XML and idea is dying parsing it....

I could add it as another module, but could I still run two JBoss instances? I need to run the second JBoss module on a difference port so that's why I need two JBoss instances running. I have been running two instances of Idea (new frame) - maybe the two module approach would be more efficient?

More importantly, I haven't heard a response to my build question. Can I make Jboss aware that my clasess are already built (after I use my build scripts) and not have Idea recompile everything? There must be a work directory or something that I could preserve - to trick Idea. Even at this moment, I am waiting for Idea to rebuild my project even though I got a clean CVS then used ant to build to my out put directory in debug first before starting Idea.

thanks again!
Mike C.

p.s. the other 11 developers are waiting to see how I make out with 4.0 before they upgrade.

Try installing from scratch instead of upgrading. During EAP I had similar problems with my large project, until I reinstalled Idea from scratch. After that the performance has been great. I don't know what the problem was, but I haven't had any such problems since.

Hope this helps...