PHPStorm is terribly slow
I have noticed a trend of PHPStorm getting slower and slower with each update, to the point where it's borderline unsuable nowadays. I am fine paying a startup time cost (even though I shouldn't be, given how fast modern CPUs are) but the performance for every single action is just bad. It takes multiple seconds to update linting, sometimes even to insert text or move caret, text completion is very inconsistent (sometimes it predicts as I type, other times I have to wait a lot for lines that used to be suggested instantly), changing active task or Git branch takes tens of seconds (which is understandable if the repo is very big, but it's a lot longer than what it used to take for the same repos).
I have a decent computer (I don't believe I need to post specs, but I don't experience general slowness), and I have increased allocated RAM for PHPStorm, disabled useless plugins, disabled natural language spelling, and just about every other thing I can think of to optimize performance.
What makes me mad is the fact that PHPStorm is otherwise an excellent product - its PHPUnit, Xdebug, Jira and Git integrations are the reason I'm not straight up switching to a different IDE. I am sorry to say that nowadays PHPStorm just feels very sloppy.
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Hello Massimiliano Cristaldi,
Let's try to figure out what's going wrong with your installation.
Could you please share the IDE logs from Help | Collect Logs and Diagnostic Data? They can be uploaded here: https://uploads.jetbrains.com/. Just let me know the upload ID in the next reply.
Right now I'd be happy with slow. Mine just crashed three times in a row just after startup. Won't stay open long enough for me to increase the already-very-generous amount of RAM it's allowed to use.
Thought it'd started to improve again after the most recent update but here we go again…
G
Hi Garethdart24,
This is definitely not the expected behavior. It would be great if you could help us investigate this.
Please collect logs after a crash directly from the filesystem - Logs Directory, and submit a separate request via Help > Contact Support or on YouTrack so we can check them.
Thanks in advance!
Crash reports were submitted. After a PC restart PHPStorm would load again, but it has completely lost the ability to find usages, click through to function definitions, it's no longer aware of defined constants…something is wrong. Like I say, I submitted the info. Hopefully that'll help the product.
I used PHPStorm for a long, long time and it was always a top quality IDE. Up to the latest 2025.* version it was fine, and some of the more recent versions were good, with auto-completion starting to become really intuitive and useful, but it does seem like something fundamental has changed within the codebase recently because slowdowns, hangs and crashes are getting to be quite a regular thing for me and they *never* were before.
G
Garethdart24, thank you for sharing the details.
The crash reports are anonymous and can not be associated with you or any other PhpStorm user. So, it would be great if you could submit a separate request and share logs from your installation as well.
As for the latter issue you described, File > Invalidate Caches should do the trick.
Thank you Anastasiia , I'll try that.
G