IDEA 6.0 Performance and Stability

You're not the only ones...

Hello Eric,

ER> Some of the issues we've encountered are:
ER>
ER> 1. Slow performance in general, especially after a few hours of
ER> heavy usage
ER>
ER> 2. Buggy in general, like sometimes you loose STDOUT when executing
ER> a process from run configurations

Unfortunately we are unable to provide any help for issues like "slow performance
in general" and "bugginess in general". We are always happy to address specific
bug reports and reports of performance problems. For performance problems,
we need information on which exactly operations are slow, and preferably
a CPU snapshot.

ER> 4. Find usages will max out memory and cause a dialog prompting to
ER> shutdown IDEA to be displayed (using -Xmx512m)

Which exactly version of IDEA does this happen with, and are there any very
large files (more than 10 megabytes) in your project? One issue which could
cause such behavior was fixed in version 6.0.1.

--
Dmitry Jemerov
Software Developer
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"

i agree that the speed is a bit lower than in previous versions, but i haven't noticed any real problems yet (more exceptions, but i don't care at all because they do not influence me). i restart idea once a week or so :). memory consumption gets up to 700mb, but i don't really care. it may as well be caused by the 50 plugins i've installed. idea does get slow after a "point of no return", but i takes days to cross it - and "slow" does not mean unusable.

I really haven't noticed any significant differences between 5 and 6.
Our code tree is around 2300 files and 170kloc.Not huge, but not tiny
either. I run with -Xmx256m and IDEA rarely uses more than 200-225 of that.

I have noticed that when I'm debugging a remote process (in this case a
tomcat app), sometimes IDEA things it's still connected when it isn't.
But I'm not sure that didn't happen before. I also think certain CVS
operations are significantly slower, but not unbearably so.

I do make heavy use of find usages and the heirarchy functions. I mostly
write straight java server-side stuff. No GUI, jsp, etc...

I don't think I've had to restart IDEA yet, but maybe I'm not exercising
the same portions of it as you. One thing I did do was uninstall a pile
of the pre-installed plugins. That seems to have made a bit of a
difference memory-wise.

I run it on my desktop (a 3GHz P4 / 2GB Ubuntu machine) and my laptop (2
GHz Core Duo / 2GB XP machine) and the laptop is a wee bit faster.

Cory

Eric Rich wrote:

Hi All,

I'm curious if we're the only users running into issues or if there are many others like us. It seems like the stability and performance going from IDEA 5 to 6 got much worse. I don't know if this is due to our particular project structure or if these two areas of product development were overlooked in favor of adding new features.

Some of the issues we've encountered are:
1. Slow performance in general, especially after a few hours of heavy usage
2. Buggy in general, like sometimes you loose STDOUT when executing a process from run configurations
3. Debugging is slow (going to look into other issues posted in regards to that)
4. Find usages will max out memory and cause a dialog prompting to shutdown IDEA to be displayed (using -Xmx512m)

I've ran into more issues.. but hard to keep track of all the little ones.

We find ourselves restarting IDEA several times a day in order to keep going.

I love the product, just wish it was a little more responsive and stable. Is anyone else running into issues like this, or are we the only ones?

Thanks!

-Eric

Here is my experience with IDEA 6.0.2 EAP (build #6043):

1. It is generally faster than 5.1.2, especially with Perforce integration enabled
2. It tends to become slow after several hours of usage (the usage includes synchronizing big external changes to the source and class files, compiling and debugging), so I have to restart it
3. My codebase is quite large
4. Previous builds were slower and less stable than 6043

Once again, we would be very greatful to everyone commenting about IDEA slowness that he contributes a snapshot of IDEA activities when it is slow.

Performance degradation could be caused by jre leaking OS handles. At least this is a known problem on Windows that is promised to be fixed in jdk5 update 10.

Thanks for the info on the JDK. I'll be sure to stay on the latest.

I'm sure there are some things we can do to speed up IDEA, but I just don't know what they are! :)

Our project has just under 4,000 Java files. I don't believe this should be much of an issue. My development machine is an Athlon 64 3700+ with 2GB RAM and RAID drives.

Is there any material on performance tips? I've searched around quite a bit and have removed all plug-ins which I can do without. I've got "synchronize files on frame activation" disabled, we always disable this, which helps a lot! I just take a coffee break when I have to synchronize the project. I've excluded as many directories as I can in the project (we have 7 modules too.)

I'm going to play with the memory settings to see if that helps. Right now I have the following VM options set:
-Xms64m
-Xmx256m
-XX:MaxPermSize=92m
-ea
-server

I had the heap set to 512 to avoid the out of memory issue with find usages. I've dropped it back down to see if that helps performance. I'm running IDEA 6.0.1 and will stay up-to-date on the releases.

I know I can take CPU snapshots and file bug reports, but all this takes time. I will try to stay on top of this and file reports for any major issues.

Thanks for all of the feedback!

-Eric

I strongly recommend to use the latest 6.0.2 EAP build (6068). You can get it from http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/IDEADEV/6.0.2+EAP .

For me there was noticeable performance improvement with this build, but I realize that the reason might be Perforce integration, not general performance improvement.

Maxim.

Eugene Vigdorchik wrote:

Performance degradation could be caused by jre leaking OS handles. At least this is a known problem on Windows that is promised to be fixed in jdk5 update 10.

Are you talking about this bug:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do;jsessionid=74934c84f3140d659c0eca61a4:WuuT?bug_id=6399321

Exactly

Note that Idea also seems pretty sensitive to disk speed - if you have
source code or Idea system directory mounted on a network drive or a
slow local disk you'll notice unacceptable performance. This is a
WONTFIX for JetBrains :( but I suppose they have to make painful cuts
sometimes.
R

Yep. Find usages sometimes hangs the IDE completely.

And even when I have a Java file with not errors, the red line stays permanently on the file tab and in the Project browser, until I restart IDEA.

Are you on < 6.0.1? The 6.0.2 EAP build (6068) resolved the find usages issue completely for me. I have no trouble with that in the 6068 build.

I've ran into that red error issue before too. I haven't ran into it in awhile though. Maybe not since I was running 6.0.0. Don't remember exactly. I tend to forget about problems once they go away. :)

-Eric

I'll try the latest EAP. The official version has given me a lot of problems so I backed out to version 5 again. The process was constantly consuming 20% of my processor even when idle I disabled file synchronization and automatic updates but that didn't help in my situation.

Grant

After some investigation it looks like my performance issues were related to the source safe integration. I disabled it and the CPU utilization went way down. Maybe someone has some insight or has experienced a similar problem. I'm using the latest build on XP.

Grant

I've noticed it's way too slower than previous version no matter how many gigs memory you have allocated to Idea, new features are good but I hate the guy sitting in the extreme right hand side down the corner. we have more then 4200 in total including jsps and .java files, Now for every single jsp I need to tell this guy to turn off the HTML or CSS syntax inspection or any other level of inspection that I do not need for some file types, I've not been able to find a global way to do this for all jsps files.
Unless Intellij comes up with real fast and more global configurable options like for inspections and other areas I will stick to 4.5

There is also a jsp bug that can give you terrible performance when you have the structure view.
http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/browse/IDEADEV-10628
Keep your structure view closed until they release a fix for it in 6.0.x.

After further use, I still get the out of memory issue when using Find Usages. It doesn't happen nearly as much in the 6.0.2 EAP as it does in 6.0.0, but I do still get it.

I also have been running into an issue with 6+ on loosing STDOUT when running something via Run Configurations. I just don't get any output on the screen, haven't looked into it very far, its probably not even running the process either. This seems to happen after closing and opening a project. Have to restart IntelliJ to get it working again.