IntelliJ 9 (Beta) on Mac OSX stability issues

Grant:

I am also experiencing 100% CPU usage problems and it is quite frustrating to use. We have a thread discussing this here: http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/message/5249363#5249363

I have not had time to run the performance analysis yet, but I think I am going to add it to my todo list today. If you are interested in doing the same maybe we can attach performance information to a bug and attempt to get it addressed before the beta is released.

Thanks!
Adam

1. CVS is effectively broken in the beta (on Windows too). You could try to disable CVS for your project or wait for a fix.
2. I think this is caused by the CVS problems.
3. Do you run IntelliJ IDEA on a 64 bit JVM? If yes, this could be caused by a PermGen that is too small. You could edit your info.plist file in the .app/Contents directory and set the maximum permanent generation size to be larger. If you run on a 32 bit JVM, I do not know what the problem is.

Bas

I'm also having problems on IntelliJ 8 if I use Java 6. I'm on Leopard, so that means it's 64-bit. I didn't think to increase my PermGen, but IIRC I have it at 192M. Using Java 1.5 (32-bit) it works fine. I had to restart the IDE very frequently (4x daily or thereabouts) and I got frequent corruption of the indexes (which was more worrying than performance). I've gone back to Java 1.5 for the moment, but I'm going to have to switch to Snow Leopard soon. I have SL at home, I'll try bumping the permgen there.

Cheers,
Colin

You can install Java 1.5 and 1.4 on Snow Leopard if you need to - http://tedwise.com/2009/09/25/using-java-1-5-and-java-1-4-on-snow-leopard/

Bas:

I don't use CVS, we use SVN.

I see most of my problems when trying to do code completion in ActionScript which is a pretty important feature of an IDE.

Ctrl+Space and Option+Enter cause the editor to hang.

I am using Java 1.5 on Leopard with 4G Ram and 1024M heap in Info.plist.

-AP

I have been experiencing major performance issues ever since the 90.xx builds. The primary issue I was discovering was related the CVS; my CPU was ramped while at the same time  idea was performing a CVS background task.
I Am still experiencing CVS issues however I did manage to iliminate the performance issue by increasing the permGen setting above 250m, as recommended, as well replacing the MacOS/idea contents file with the current current JavaApplicationStub.

There was a known issue with running Maia on the Mac when using Java 6. The fix was to replace the Contents/MacOS/idea file with the jdk 1.6 javaApplicationStub as shown. From now on Before I run Maia for the first time I repeat this process.

Is it related? Does it really fix the performance issue? or does the permGen setting? Do we really need to replace the idea file? really great questions I just know when I was experiencing the performance issues I replaced the file and ever since I have not experienced any problems. It was worth a try I figured.

(/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub /Applications/Maia-IU-90.154.app/Contents/MacOS/idea)

What and how did you do this?

I am using the Beta build - where is there a more stable idea file to use?

Check this out it explains the steps.
http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/message/5240216#5240216

Hy all,

I just tried out the new beta 9 version on my Mac OSX (snow leopard) and I have major problems.

I tried it for about two hours and it crashed about 6 times (the red thingy in the right-lower corner) and I had to kill it a couple of times because of 100% CPU usage for such a long time that I did't trust it anymore (happend with commit to SVN)

I have java version "1.6.0_15"

I ran back to my 8.1.3 version but to my horror that versions seems to be broken now to.
See this screenshot of an opened project. There should be all kinds of nice buttons and text and stuff there :-(

I uninstalled my 9M1 (which I never realy tried) version and the 9 Beta version.
Rebooted my Mac (which I almost never have to do) and tied again with version 8.1.3.

To my complete surprise and horror... No difference.

Uninstalled my 8.1.3 version which had been running fine for month until today and reinstalled it...
Again no difference.

I don't know what to do. Anybody?

I would really appreciate help.

Thanx,
Ivo.

This was my first try of IntelliJ 9 (beta).  I use a macbook pro, 4gbytes of memory, 10.6.2 of OS X and nothing running on the machine other than the ide.

I don't use IntelliJ, I normally use Netbeans 6.7 or Eclipse 3.5 (depending on project) and both are very fast on this machine.

In my first 30 minutes Intellij hung 3 times. So badily I had to use force quit.

Finally got it going, and within 5-10 minutes of editing a class, I get errors popping up asking me to report to jetbrains.  (I've reported 2 of them). I restarted after each error.

The part I find weird it talks about "Indexing" as a background task when starting, If it is a background task why can't i create a new class in a new project ???  It opens the new project but leaves me hanging for a few minutes while it indexes.   I know thats only a minor complaint, but it takes much longer to get going than other ide's and makes a point (balloon bubble) of stating its doing background tasks.

Overall it is very sluggishq on a mac.  Dragging /streching/resizing application window is very slow,  and it generally seems much less responsive than eclipse/netbeans on the same machine.

While I've been typing this I've left Intellij idle,  when I switch back I get the beachball !    Another crash.

I understand it is a beta, but haven't seen a product crash so much before.

Hi all,

Thanks for the responses.

Firstly I was running in 32 bit mode of the Apple JRE 1.6 so I don't think it was directly related to that.

The thing that seems to have made the most difference is switching off the CVS integration in the project. It no longer tries to sync up with CVS and leaves threads hanging there which is a good outcome. Except of course I now have to use another tool to check in my code to CVS.

My PermGen was already set to 200M but I increased it to 250M to  be on the safe side.

So far it hasn't hung since I made both of these changes. I have also tried running Intellij 9 (BETA) in 64 bit mode and it currently seems to be alright.

If I get any further hangs then I will post it up here.

Thanks everybody for you help.

Hi Ivo,

This is a known problem, see here: http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/thread/283350. Short version, you can manually fiddle with your config (Maia changes it in ways that Diana doesn't like) or you can download the new Diana EAP which fixes the problem.

Cheers,
Colin

Thanks Colin,

I found the same solution this morning (after about 3 hours sleep)
I installed the EAP and now it works again.

I really hope that the mac version of the 9 beta becomes more stable soon. I love my IDEA IDE and I was really shaken up about all the issues I had after trying it yesterday.
But I have great confidence in the JetBrainers

Cheerz,
Ivo.

Did you get anywhere with this issue?

Hi all,

I also use IntelliJ on a Macbook Pro running Show Leopard. The only way I can get IntelliJ to work, is to increase the MaxPermSize to 250m or more (/Applications/IntelliJ IDEA 9.0 Beta.app/Contents/Info.plist). Even in tiny (15 classes) projects IntelliJ doesn't work otherwise. And for bigger projects (10000+ files)  250m also seems to be quite enough. But it's a shame that, when switching from NetBeans to IntelliJ, your first experience is so bad. I hope it's fixed in the final!

I've just made similar changes, setting the PermSize & MaxPermSize

I'm currently using the following settings
-Xms128m -Xmx512m -XX:Permsize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

and IntelliJ is like a different product.  It hasn't crashed at all. So far very stable and no issues

I can second that... but not for Mac OSX. It's true for Windows XP also :-).

I'm using:

-Xms32m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=300m
-ea

and it run's as smoothly as never before. Just great.

I did not get to, I have had to switch back to Eclipse at work right now because I can't keep fighting the editor. I need to get some things done...

Flex support is almost useless for me right now.

Hi Adam,

If you're referring to IDEADEV-41307, did you try the updated build (193)?

-tt

Well I Started playing around with it 9 Beta again yesterday (new build version 90.193) and did the new settings for maxperm etc.
It still is not stable on the mac though. I tried developing a simple Flex app and it broke down every 5 minutes or so and the plugin got disabled.
The python plugin seems to be gone (and can't be found in the plugin list) while I got a mail telling me that issue I raised

IDEA-25891 The Python plugin does not work

should be fixed in 9. Whell I don't see it yet.

It still has an issue with the mouse when clicking on a listbox in intellij. I have to blame IDEA Core quite a lot.
Restarting IDEA every few minutes is not my idea of stable...

I didn't have the CPU hog (100% for minutes at a time) anymore that I had before but I don't think I did anything with subversion yesterday and that was where I had that problem before.

In my case I still don't think that the 9 version is ready to be FINAL yet. At least not for the mac.

Cheerz,
Ivo.