Multiple IntelliJ projects

Hello Justin,

Is there any way to open > 1 IntelliJ instance at a time?

I have 4 different codebases here, each with 3000+ classes. Because I
need to work in all 4 frequently, I've started opening up 4 projects
at once in IntelliJ. This allows me to quickly switch between them,
because otherwise I have to wait forever for IntelliJ to parse, cache,
etc...

The problem is that IntelliJ often becomes extremely slow and hangs.
It frequently will get so bad that I have to kill IntelliJ. But,
since it's all one Windows instance, it kills all 4 projects.

Then I have to go through opening up all 4 projects again - taking >
30 minutes to accomplish. The cycle is very painful.

Can I run multiple IntelliJ processes so that killing one won't bring
down all 4 ?

Yes, you can. You need to adjust -Didea.config.path and -Didea.system.path
in IDEA_HOME\bin\idea.lax for each IDEA copy, so that different config and
system directories are used, this will allow to run multiple IDEA copies.

A better solution would be to download zipped IDEA version (change .exe to
.zip in the download link), then make 4 batch files with different config
and system properties and you'll be able to use one IDEA installation and
run multiple copies using different batch files.

Also play with a heap size in the .lax file, this may help you to improve
performance.

--
Serge Baranov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

Are you sure, that you need 4 projects? Maybe opening one project with 4
modules solve the problem. If you come from Eclipse, there is a different
meaning, Eclipse' "projects" are named "modules" in IDEA and IDEA's
"project" is similar to Eclipse' "workspace", IIRC.

Tom

I don't see how that changes my problem? If I have 4 modules in a single project, it will take ~4x as long to load as one of our four individual projects. If IntelliJ hangs with this 1project/4modules, I'll have to restart and reload all 4 modules's worth of code (since it's one project)... unpleasant at best.

Well, having 4 frames open takes more memory than one frame.

Tom

At least modules (not projects) share commons between them like info for
libraries including JDK.

-

Maxim Shafirov
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"