PhpStorm 2026.1 freezing constantly – IDE becomes unusable

Hi,

I’m experiencing exactly the same issue with PhpStorm 2026.1, and I can fully confirm how problematic it is.

The IDE freezes very frequently — several times per hour — sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes much longer. During those moments, everything becomes completely unresponsive, which makes it extremely difficult to maintain any kind of workflow.

Like you, I’m working on a fairly standard setup (Symfony project, Docker, nothing particularly heavy), so this behavior is really unexpected. It doesn’t seem related to any specific action — the freezes just happen randomly while coding, navigating files, or even typing.

At this point, it’s honestly becoming unworkable. The constant interruptions are seriously impacting productivity and focus.

If anyone has found a workaround, identified the cause, or knows whether this is a known issue in this version, I’d really appreciate a quick response. Any help would be more than welcome, because in its current state, the IDE is almost unusable.

Thanks in advance.

Hey Folks,

Unfortunately, there is no single solution when it comes to performance problems, sorry, and usually all cases are different and even unique.

Sometimes (quite often, I would say), it is a result of plugins’ misbehaviour, sometimes, it is some known IDE issues or a project misconfiguration, like constantly changing files leading to rescans/reindexings.

In any way, there are no workarounds that I can suggest right away apart from collecting logs and submitting a support ticket or a YouTrack report.    

Vasiliy Yur Thanks for your answer, I've just created a support ticket with the dump threads from PhpStorm when it's freezing

Hi,

After upgrading to 2026.1, besides the freezing i got huge icons after restart and the UI is completely unusable. I have tried to clear the cache, to disable the plugins removing the content of appdata/plugins for this program. It is getting worse and worse. Now i cannot even start an old version of PHPStorm.  

Please, I need some help to resolve that problem.

The same here. Impossible to work. 

Hello, 

Same here! After upgrading to 2026.1, I got huge icons & freezes… Nothing seems to work.
 

Since the latest PhpStorm update (Snap), I’ve been experiencing a lot of freezes, the IDE became almost unusable.

To roll back to a stable version:

1. Check available versions:

 

snap list --all phpstorm

 

2 . Revert to the previous version:

 

sudo snap revert phpstorm

 

If you get this error:

 

error: cannot revert "phpstorm": snap "phpstorm" has running apps (phpstorm)

 

👉 You need to kill the running processes:

 

sudo kill -9 7146 7431

 

(replace with your own PIDs)

1. Then run again:

 

sudo snap revert phpstorm

 

Since then, everything works fine again 👍

Hope this helps!

The same thing is happening to me and it is very frustrating.

Hopefully a new version is released soon with fixes. It happens every day several times a day.

Third freeze today for me

two consecutive crashes within 25 minutes

same here, very annoying.
Seems to happen arbitrarily, sometimes even when i just type something the commit message.

I don't use PhpStorm, but this exact problem is also plaguing WebStorm and GoLand

3 crashes yesterday - that is the average I'm running on lately

What's more, the only solution to restart is to kill PHPStorm from the task manager. This takes at least 1 minute to complete. Way to break the dynamic when you're writing long and complex code! 

Besides, Phpstorm doesn't save the code regularly so I lose a bunch of code every time it crashes, that's probably the worst part! 

I am going to continue posting here until this hugely annoying problem is fixed. Can't believe we haven't heard back from Jetbrains yet!

I have tried increasing the RAM from 2GB to 4GB (through the Help - “change memory settings” menu) but that didn't change anything.

EDIT: gonna try the 2026.1.1 “preview” version today. Hopefully the crashes will stop. I will report here.

61350 the same here

I've noticed consistent freezes when working with database results containing large text fields.

Whenever I try to interact with the filed containing large amount of text, the whole IDE freezes every single time.

Vasiliy Yur To be super clear: It's NOT a “performance” problem per-se! :-) No CPU spikes - not even 1 core; more than enough free RAM - also no spikes.

Seems to me there's some async/await-type of bug - and it really only started to happen in this last version - no plugin change - so I am very strongly suspecting something in the 2026.1 itself has a bug.

Btw this may be subjective - but it seems to me it happens less to none when only 1 phpstorm project window is opened.

I can confirm that unfortunately the 2026.1.1 preview version still freezes :(

I run into a similar issue with the 2026.1 version for MacOS, where the UI completely freezes for 90s+ on specific actions in some views. A downgrade to 2025.3.4 has solved the issue for me in the meanwhile.

2026.1 (Build #PS-261.22158.283) is completely unusable. I reinstalled a clean version of PhpStorm on a clean (brand new) M5 Macbook (a very capable machine - I can only imagine what it's like on older hardware). It crashes again and again. Naturally I have no non-default plugins; it's a vanilla installation and the IDE is just not working.

I pasted the thread dump into Claude, and it says the following. Of course I did not check it at all (not my job), but maybe it can point you in the right direction:
— CLAUDE:
The chain of events:
1. You pressed a key in the editor (a typing/editor action). The AWT-EventQueue-0 (the UI/EDT thread) started processing it via EditorWriteActionHandler.doExecute (line 24), which requires a write lock on the document/PSI model.
2. The EDT is stuck waiting to upgrade to a write permit (upgradeWritePermit at line 17). It's blocked in SuvorovProgress.dispatchEventsUntilComputationCompletes — the IDE's mechanism that shows a "please wait" overlay while waiting for a write lock to become available.
3. The write lock can't be acquired because 16 background threads are holding read locks and are all BLOCKED on the same synchronized monitor: HighlightInfoUpdaterImpl@62f3b08c, which is owned by "JobScheduler FJ pool 14/17" (thread Id=1852).
4. Thread 14/17 (the lock holder) is RUNNABLE but stuck in a tight loop inside HighlightInfoUpdaterImpl.addEvictedInfos() → HashSet.add() → HighlightInfo.equals() → RangeMarkerImpl.isValid(). It's processing a potentially huge number of evicted HighlightInfo objects (syntax highlighting markers), iterating through them one by one and adding to a HashSet.

HighlightInfoUpdaterImpl is responsible for recycling stale syntax highlighting data. Thread 14/17 holds a synchronized lock on this object while processing what appears to be a very large collection of evicted highlight infos (the ConcurrentRefHashMap.processQueue at line 123 is draining weak/soft references). All 15 other FJ pool threads are blocked waiting to enter the same synchronized block — either at psiElementVisited() or recycleInvalidPsiElements(). Meanwhile, the EDT can't acquire the write lock because all these background threads hold read locks (via tryRunReadAction), and read locks can't be released until the synchronized block completes.

The freeze is caused by the GeneralHighlightingPass (syntax highlighting) having accumulated a very large number of stale HighlightInfo objects. When thread 14/17 tries to recycle them, it holds a synchronized lock for too long while iterating a massive collection. This blocks all other highlighting threads and prevents the EDT write lock from being acquired, freezing the UI.

Hello Folks,

Thank you for your activity in this thread.
We are truly sorry for the unpleasant experience caused by the new IDE update.

Apart from some known bugs, usually, performance or sudden freeze-related issues could be quite different from installation to installation even when there is a common prerequisite – a new version installation.

This is why I would always suggest submitting a new YouTrack report or support request with basic troubleshooting information (logs and/or CPU snapshots). 

I know that some of the current discussion participants have already done this (thanks a lot!) and we are currently investigating these reports (while cannot fully reproduce yet).

In any way, here are a couple of known and confirmed performance issues:

- Freezes in FUS (telemetry services): https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-224542/IDE-Freeze-FUS-Telemetry-Deadlock (and its relatives). The workaround here is to add -Dperformance.watcher.pooled.enabled=false to Help > Edit Custom VM Options (will also help if you notice a bloated IDE logs directory);

- https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-235455/Long-read-action-in-com.intellij.codeInsight.daemon.impl.HighlightInfoUpdaterImpl.addEvictedInfos
The fix should be already available in the recent 2026.1.1 RC build; you can identify this issue by the mentioned method name in freeze thread dump logs. 

But once again, I genuinely urge everyone to submit a bug report, so we could take a closer look and quickly find a fix or at least a workaround.

Jave Web 

To be super clear: It's NOT a “performance” problem per-se! :-) No CPU spikes - not even 1 core; more than enough free RAM - also no spikes.

This is a fair correction!
Usually, I use “performance” more like an umbrella term for all things that affect the user experience when it comes to the IDE smoothness, so freezes also count here :)

Nickdnk this seems to match the freezes I've been experiencing, may I ask whether you have already submitted a YouTrack report? 

The freezes occur systematically while I am using the code editor and I either type or paste some text, and then editor is supposed to do the syntax highlighting and it freezes & crashes. Sometimes it doesn't allow me to press the “Dump threads” button.

It is definitely not a performance issue - this happens when the RAM isn't overloaded; I doubled the RAM and it's still happening, besides this is a pretty new computer, a recent purchase with modern components; it's a desktop computer that is pretty high powered and well ventilated.

I am using the 2026.1.1 preview and still getting the crashes.

I have the 2026.1.1 RC

and added -Dperformance.watcher.pooled.enabled=false to Help > Edit Custom VM Options

And I am still getting the crashes

It's seriously frustrating!

Just saw this in the youtrack “Hi, thanks for reporting this issue. We have fixed this issue in an internal build and will backport the fix in the future 2026.1.x version (probably 2026.1.2).” 

Gotta wait for 2026.1.2 then… 

I have freezing problem while PHPStorm 2026.1 does project analysis on laravel/symphony project in particular and while scanning vendor/node_modules folder in general. Even if UI is not frozen you better not touch it until analysis is done, because it can freeze UX for good. I even needed process kill a few times (after each I have to make an analysis on any of my projects on project load - just like after cache invalidating). And from time to time it starts analyzing anew, usually after changes to classes. I had no such problem with 2025.3, so it should be update issue, and I'm inclined to see an AI/MCP modules as perpetrators. 

Also from time to time there is a slight freeze (1-3 seconds) while typing, but it's rare.

Vasiliy Yur To help you with the replication - by educated guess it seems to me the best way to replicate is *not* by just “simple IDE” and “sample project” but rather some really big big project cloned 2 other times, opening 3 windows - each holding separate large project clone - each having its own edits, lots of opened files, different git trees etc. and also bunch of terminals with LARGE outputs (big AI sessions, static analysis outputs etc…).

Because it always seems to come down to EDT - may be different causes on why is it overloaded - but the issue is, as I've predicted above, something with overloaded async - that's the main issue not each person's partciular reasons why they overloaded it.

One of my AI summaries for freeze thread dump:

The UI is frozen because the Event Dispatch Thread (EDT) is stuck rendering an excessive amount of text in a terminal component. The stack shows it is heavily loaded while processing history and screen lines via sun.java2d.xr.XRBackendNative.XRenderCompositeTextNative.This rendering bottleneck has caused a deadlock-like state for other critical threads. The AWT-XAWT thread, which is responsible for system-level window events, is currently waiting for a lock held by the frozen EDT, preventing any OS-level interaction with the app.The dump indicates this was likely triggered by multiple active TerminalEmulator-Local threads producing a high volume of output simultaneously. The resulting recursive paint operations are too deep and complex for the UI thread to process, leading to the complete hang.

61350

I did submit a YouTrack, but they just told me to install the preview version, which I did not yet because others said it made no difference, including yourself. I'm living with the issue for now but it's really frustrating. I have to force-kill the IDE probably 3 times every day. I essentially did nothing to try and mitigate it other than complain, full transparency. I might try to increase RAM today but that probably doesn't help either.

Jave Web I agree with this. My project is huge as well. I imagine it never happens on a small test-project which may be why they are struggling to reproduce or fix it.

I also noticed that the thread dump includes a bunch of references to a project I wasn't even working in (but that might have been open in another window), so you may even need to have multiple large projects open to have this happen.

Hey guys! Back with some news.

First, I submitted a request and received a response — they opened a public ticket: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-84554

Second, since it still crashes 10+ times a day, I’ve tried several things. I’m currently working on Windows, and I suspected WSL2 might be the cause. So last Thursday (the 24th), I tried using JetBrains Gateway, and it seems to be working quite well. Apart from a minor freeze I noticed, everything looks fine.

So WSL2 might be the cause, but JetBrains may also have introduced something in the latest version, since I didn’t have any issues with 2025.4.

Hey!

Thank you for the update.

I also had a thought that it was a WSL (or namely Ijent subsystem) deeply relevant here as freeze thread dumps point there. 
But I was not able to reproduce it yet on my setup, and I have tried a lot of different scenarios. The only major difference in your system as I recall and that I cannot yet test is that you have ARM, but I do not think that it is related.

In any way, I have left an internal comment in that ticket, thanks again for the update.
 

I am using 2026.1.2 PREVIEW (upgraded this morning) and have got a crash just now “as usual”

Same symptoms, same everything