IntelliJ IDEA 2025.1.7.1 Very Slow on Windows 11 During Git Operations and Branch Switching
Answered
Hi Team,
I’m facing severe performance issues with IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, especially during Git-related operations.
Environment
IntelliJ Version
IntelliJ IDEA 2025.1.7.1 (Community Edition)
System Configuration
- OS: Windows 11 Pro
- CPU: Intel Core i7-1165G7 @ 2.80 GHz
- RAM: 16 GB
Current VM Options
-Xms1024m
-Xmx6144m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=512m
-XX:+UseG1GC
-XX:HeapBaseMinAddress=2g
-Xss512k
Problem Description
IntelliJ IDEA becomes very slow during common operations such as:
- Git Pull
- Git Diff
- Switching branches
- Indexing after branch switch
- General project responsiveness
Sometimes even simple Git operations take a long time to complete, and the IDE feels laggy overall.
Additional Observations
- CPU usage occasionally spikes during Git operations.
- Branch switching freezes the IDE for several seconds/minutes.
- Git operations from terminal seem faster than from IntelliJ.
- Issue is more noticeable on large projects.
Questions
- Are my VM options optimal for a 16 GB RAM machine?
- Is there any recommended tuning for Git performance in IntelliJ IDEA 2025?
- Are there known issues with Git integration in this version?
- Would disabling certain plugins/features help?
- Any recommendations for improving indexing and branch-switch performance?
What I’ve Tried
- Increased heap size to 6 GB
- Restarted IDE multiple times
- Invalidated caches
- Updated Git version
- Checked antivirus exclusions (still investigating)
Would appreciate any guidance on improving performance.
Thanks!
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Hello, thanks for the detailed information and troubleshooting steps. There are known issues with this version when running in WSL, but not natively in windows.
Providing more detailed diagnostic data to the support team will help to answer the remaining questions and pinpoint what is causing the performance issue.
How to Enable Debug Logs and share with support:
git4idea.commands.GitHandlertime.git4ideaI have the same issue. Using ultimate. Sharing the diagnostics:
Upload id: 2026_08_30_8qx3XP9bvXFVUJMYjy89ao (file: idea-logs-20260830-1223343699026266218941073.zip)
It is apparent that your project isn't stored under WSL (it's a native Windows path using the native Git for Windows executable), so this isn't the WSL-related Git performance issue that was fixed in IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3.4/2026.1.
What the logs do show is that every Git command IntelliJ IDEA runs is taking far longer than it should.
That pattern usually points to something outside the IDE slowing down each Git process as it starts up, most often security software intercepting the process. Your logs show Windows Defender's real-time protection was off at the time, but if you have a separate antivirus or endpoint-security agent, that would be worth checking too.
To help narrow this down, could you capture a CPU snapshot while the slowdown is happening?
1. Reproduce a slow Git operation (e.g., switch branches or run git status from within the IDE).
2. While it's running slowly, go to Help | Diagnostic Tools | Capture CPU Snapshot and record for the duration of the slowdown.
3. Attach the resulting snapshot file here.
It would also help if you could check with your IT team whether any antivirus/EDR software is actively monitoring process creation on this machine, and if so, try adding an exclusion for git.exe and the project folder as a test.
Could you also check whether the same Git operations perform faster when run from the command line (outside the IDE)?
What is the Git path configured in the IDE — Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S) | Version Control | Git | Path to Git executable?
Are there any Git hooks being run that could slow down the command execution?
If the CPU profiling option is not available in your IDE, installing the Performance Testing plugin may make it available.
Thanks again for your patience.
Kind regards,
Emin