Performance problems with latest nightly builds
The lastest nightly builds haven't been working out very well on my machine.
I experienced a golden period with the late 18xx builds through 19xx, where everything ran beautifully and unicorns cavorted in rainbows and moonshine. It was that good, and I salute the work of the plugin developers to get it to that point.
Unfortunately, the 20xx builds so far have had draggier and draggier performance on my machine. I tried increasing the amount of memory allocated to Idea, and in the project modules, tried throwing more memory at the Scala facets in the compiler settings. The load on my Linux box is reasonable (I still have free memory, the disk is not swapping like crazy, CPU usage is not pegged), but the Scala plugin performance remains slow.
Now I am at the point where the syntax highlighters takes about ten seconds to catch up with what I have typed, the import resolver sometimes needs minutes to pop up a suggested import, and today with build 2039 I noticed that Idea had stopped reliably syncing my work to disk (shiver).
Ctrl plus space to get variable completion (or something) causes stack overflows (I filed http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/SCL-2302 about those). The WhiteSpaceAndCommentsProcessor has begun throwing errors too. After my latest restart, the Project Structure dialog box won't come up anymore (which I think someone else already reported as a bug?)
Is anyone successfully using the 20xx nightly builds? Any suggestions?
Current environment:
Idea 9.0.3 EAP IU-95.474
Ubuntu 10.04 (64-bit) with JDK 1.6.0_20
Scala plugin nightly build 0.3.2039
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After updating to Intellij Idea EAP IU-95.495 and Scala plugin nightly build 0.3.2046, performance seems a little better.
It still takes the syntax highlighter about five seconds to catch up with what I am typing. Sometimes I'll open a new .scala file and the syntax highlighter will only highlight syntax as I actually scroll through and click into an unhighlighted region.
Sporadically, attempting to CTRL + left click on a class or method name locks up the entire IDE for a couple of seconds. When I look at idea.log I don't see any stack overflows, but I do see high CPU usage during those times. Would it be helpful to capture and post CPU usage during that time?
(I should note I always keep the Structure panel closed because it used to cause problems a couple of months ago back in the 14xx nightly builds - now it's just a habit.)
I am having similar issues. I upgrade daily, but then revert back to 1939. The performance is simply too disruptive to get much work done. We have seen these periods of poor performance in the past. For some I have suffered thru, for others I have had to lay back. But always the performance catches up.
I'm not into the nightly builds, but I'm having problems with perfomance of CTRL+Space on the last 0.3.2029 release. Was fine on the previous official version. After some pain getting everything back to work, I'd like to knwo the proper way to revert to the previous version.
Thomas
Don't worry - reverting is easy. Download the version you want to revert to. Shut down Idea.
Open up your plugin directory. If you don't know where it is, open {install.path.to.idea}/bin/idea.properties and look for the idea.plugins.path property.
Once you're in the plugins directory, remove the existing Scala directory. The open the plugin zip and copy the top-level Scala directory into the plugins directory.
Restart Idea. Open Settings (Ctrl+S), go to the Plugins settings, click on Scala under the Installed tab, and verify that the version displayed on the righthand side is the expected version you downloaded to.
My process for using the nightly builds is as follows: I keep a copy of last stable plugin stashed in my homedir, and each day I download the new nightly build, delete the existing Scala directory in plugins and copy in the new nightly build Scala directory. If the new nightly build misbehaves too much, I shut down Idea, trash the new nightly build, and revert to my last stable copy.
That said, you might be give build 0.3.2048. I wasn't bowled over by its performance, but haven't seen any stack overflows yet today.
Performance with 0.3.2054 is much improved. I've been refactoring for hours, and the syntax highlighter has been keeping up.
Ctrl+space and the import recognizer are still lag a bit, but overall I'm very happy with the performance improvements in the last several days.
I'll give it a try. I rolled back to 0.3.1814 because I could stand the long waits. Version 0.3.2048 got to a point where even typing was an issue. I also notice that while my project's IDEA memory usage on 0.3.1814 start at 200MB and grows to 300MB, with 0.3.2048 it starts at 300MB. I have the impression that some internal structure is growing in size very quickly and making everything stop.
I do beleive my project it relatively large. I have scala.swing, Jetty, and 15Kloc to digest. 0.3.2048 started ok, but eventually I couldn't even type.0.3.1814 is still ok, but even it is growing slow. Are there places I should clean to make sure nothing is using resources?
On question for the gurus on the forum? Breaking the project into several maven modules will help perfomance? I want to do this for other reason (chiefly modularity and reducing build time).
Thomas
Well, here are my experiences using 0.3.2054:
I am working with in a branch with only two Scala modules at present (full project has six of them plus lots of "legacy" :p Java/Spring/Hibernate modules). One module depends on Akka, so it has loads of dependencies.
Here are my relevant settings from idea.vmoptions:
-Xms256m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=384m
When I start Idea, memory usage starts out close to 300MB. Over the course of the work day, memory usage slowly heads north toward using most of 1GB. (I've tried giving Idea an even bigger mx setting a couple of builds ago when the performance was really dreadful, but it didn't actually improve anything and I needed the memory elsewhere, so I reduced it back to 1GB. The mongo MaxPermSize is really more for projects where I have to deal with running Tomcat, but it doesn't seem to hurt here.)
I've been refactoring for close on to ten hours now, and the plugin has been fairly well behaved. I am seeing something of "boom and bust" GC behaviour observed in the 14xx series of the nightly build, but overall, not too bad. I'll happily restart Idea every ten hours for the utility I get from the Scala plugin.