IDEA 2018.1 Node.js breakpoints so slow it is unusable

Overall performance has degraded. I used to be able to scroll a large unit test file, now it is choppy. Is there a performance test suite for IDEA, or some way to get objective performance stats?

We are not aware of performance degrading in 2018.1. Please try taking CPU snapshots once the issue occurs - see https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/articles/207241235-Reporting-performance-problems

I rolled back to 2017.3.5 since 2018 was unusable. I advised the team to not upgrade yet even though we own licenses. Debugging node was excruciatingly slow. I gave it a shot but I can't waste more time trying to figure out why it is slow. Now that I'm on the prior version everything is snappy again.

MacOS Sierra, 2.6 GHz i7 with 16GB RAM. 

I will let you know if anyone else upgrades if they have the same issue.

I can take a look at memory profiling; maybe after our next release.

I second the above, it's extremely slow for everyone in our team (nodejs 8 + angular/react + typescript). Scrolling is choppy, debugging actually hangs the IDE once a breakpoint is hit (when debugging node). Unusable! Rolled back to previous version too.

Please try taking CPU snapshots once the issue occurs - see https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/articles/207241235-Reporting-performance-problems

It's a bit hard taking CPU snapshots when the app is hanged :). Did you try to reproduce the issue on your side? Simply start a template app with node+typescript+express with a NodeJS debug configuration, set a breakpoint and call some api endpoint which will cause your breakpoint to be hit. 

None of the projects I've tried show up similar issues...

Can you provide a template project you can recreate the issue with?

Strange. I installed 2018.1 again and started a CPU usage profiling session: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1voxfrhliiomq4h/WS-181.4203.535_adrianhara_05.04.2018_20.04.44.zip?dl=0

This time it didn't hang when debugging, but was generally slow. I also noticed that while working in the IDE Activity Monitor shows a high CPU % usage: when debugging 400%+, when editing source code files 100-250%. My fans are spinning all the time and it's a pretty new MacBookPro 15 machine. 

With 2017.3.5 I regularly had 5-6 projects opened simultaneously without any kind of fan noise.

Unfortunately it would be tough to provide a project template as its not open source. Can you please try to check first the profiling session? Maybe you already see the issue...

looks similar to https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-31987, fix will be included in 2018.1.1

@Ariks+jetbrains These are memory snapshots, not CPU... And they don't look related to the problems discussed in this thread.

Please create a new support ticket or a new thread at https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200382555-IntelliJ-IDEA-Users, providing CPU snapshots taken when the issue occurs

Hi Elena, you are right! Here's a snapshot I uploaded that started before opening, and ended after closing the file /src/v2/wallet.js in this project: https://github.com/bitgo/bitgojs 

IU-181.4203.550_arik_16.07.2018_16.05.49.zip

It is unfortunately still unusable and I literally cannot edit that file due to how slow Intellij gets. I would love for a fix to be deployed.

Please try decreasing -Xmx and -Xms values - having both set to 4Gb causes long GC pauses, decreasing the performance.

I can also see a problem that is fixed in 2018.2. Can you check if the issue persist in the EAP?

I've halved both values and now it's sluggish on other files, too. I have not tried the 2018.2 EAP yet.

Elena - you guys need to do a complete freeze on any and every new feature you are developing and take three months to do extensive functional and performance testing of everything JetBrains. You need to download every single public repository from github and spend several hours actually working with it.

I promise you - you will find plenty of issues.

Working with JetBrains products (PhpStorm, WebStorm, IntelliJ, and a few more) - each version is worse than the previous one. There are so many functional and performance regressions, and the constant answers we see on forums is "please submit snapshot" (or for functional: "please open a bug on YouTrack").

Newsflash: we don't work for you. We are paying customers. Happy to assist once in a while to solve some rare issue, but not to spend half of our working time on YouTrack.

Maybe it was tolerable business-wise in the days of NetBeans and Eclipse, but go and try Visual Studio Code. It has enough IDE-like features to be comparable to JetBrains products in terms of the work it needs to do behind the scenes, and it's insanely fast, stable, and reliable.

Please take time off new features to improve your infrastructure and do whatever is necessary to stop releasing so many bugs and regressions.

Please change the software as necessary to give sensible performance, because as it is now, your IDEs in many cases hold developers back rather than push them forward. If we need to give up on the ability to refactor TypeScript that appears inside PHP that is generated by SQL that is invoked from Python then so be it. If it means that you need to develop one thousand flags to disable functionality to improve speed then so be it.

From past experience I know that JetBrains is not very customer-oriented (even on public forums like this). I hope that by some divine miracle someone will actually take this message to heart and make the necessary changes in product and company culture.

The same issue,  tried to debug sample javascript, its fine, while debug react js application, web storm became extremely slow (unusable), checked Activity Monitor on Mac, Google Chrome Helper %CPU was very high, though it might be Google Chrome Helper problem, disabled all chrome extensions as suggested by others. web storm still very slow.  reverted Webstorm to the previous version WebStorm-2018.1.6.dmg as suggested by others, web Storm can debug reactjs application without the lag issue.  the problem persists with all versions after WebStorm-2018.1.6.dmg and reproducible.   Please resolve this issue. I've uploaded CPU snapshots a couple of times already.    

this thread is about Node.js debugging; so your issue is likely different

>Google Chrome Helper %CPU was very high

this is likely https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=848210, it's not the IDE problem; disabling all extensions may help

>reverted Webstorm to the previous version WebStorm-2018.1.6.dmg as suggested by others, web Storm can debug reactjs application without the lag issue. 

Is Ensure breakpoints are detected when loading scripts option enabled in your JavaScriptDebug run configuration? does disabling it make any difference?

react debug use Node.js (express) as the debug server, so the problem is similar

It's not; server matters nothing here.

I can confirm what others have said here.  I "upgraded" to 2018.3 tonight and now my debugging is unusably slow.  And no, I can't get a CPU snapshot.  My program never runs if I try (or at least it didn't run after 10 minutes of 100% CPU usage...).  I tried going back to the previous version, but somehow the debugging degradation followed me.

I don't know what's going on, but it is a serious problem for serious developers trying to debug their code.

Why can't you take CPU snapshot? Unfortunately we have no chance to isolate and fix your issue unless you provide snapshots (some additional logging can also be required if snapshots don't give us a clue)

Because it freezes on node startup when I enable CPU profiling (as I said... for about 10 minutes at 100% cpu usage).  Note that it doesn't run any of MY code.  It just sits there on node startup.

What is freezing - WebStorm? Does it stop responding, so that you can't use menus, etc.? Please provide the auto-generated thread dumps then (your log folder zipped)

Whole IDE (IntelliJ) becomes unusable when debugging node.js project. You cannot do anything.. even clicking stop button takes 1min.

Probably not really the right topic to jump into, but the freezing and stuff also appear with other languages (PHP, Python, Ruby) sometimes with debugging configurations, other times without.When i first started using EAP 2018.3.1 (hoping that the slow scrolling and freezing of the IDE will go away), I submited probably a dozen reports per hour with crashing plugins (you should call it ECQA as in early customer qa). I should mention that this is my first post here, but after a year of testing all kinds of configurations just to have an usable IDE, things just got worse ... a lot worse. JetBrains should start to investigate the issues internally and stop using customers as QA's. If you can't handle large files, more than one language per project or require a quantum computer to properly handle a simple nodejs app, then, as someone already said, maybe it's time to move to Code or other IDEAs. I should mention that issues presented here appear on the majority of our team of about 20 people. I won't ask 20 people to start CPU profiling their IDEs just because ... well, you didn't test the product on any real world application.

It freezes For me over time This is WebStorm 2020. Its not usuable and Debugger is a very critical tool that I need. 

Compared with more fatures I think users may be more interested in performance. too low to coding