CODEWITHSUNDEEP
performanceintellij-ideaide
Nick Charney Kaye
Nick Charney Kaye

Reputation: 4330

How to optimize IntelliJ IDEA for my specific project?

IntelliJ is a massive software development platform. Out of the box, it's prepared to mow through Java, Ruby on Rails, C#, FTP my files to remote servers, and the list goes on. Considering the third-party plugin ecosystem, the options are even more extensive.

What I seek is optimization for the specific project(s) I am working on today, including:

Upvotes: 9

Views: 11774

Answers (3)

Nick Charney Kaye
Nick Charney Kaye

Reputation: 4330

Disable all of the plugins not used for this project

Spend some time in the Settings > Plugins menu, carefully disabling absolutely every plugin that I'm not actually using for this project.

I'm not suggesting some hack like enabling 'Power Save' mode or changing highlighting levels or disabling plugins that provide usefulness. I've just noticed that at any given time, I need only a specialized combination of the thousand+ available plugins in the IntelliJ IDEA ecosystem. And the fact is, 100% of the plugins are imperfect; some even have bugs!

It turns out, if I want IntelliJ IDEA to run fast, I have to sacrifice the excitement of my toolbars bearing all these extra fancy icons I don't need for this project.

Mark temporary folders as "excluded"

It's in the Project Structure > Modules interface, or by menu-clicking on the folders in the Project explorer, and choosing Mark As > Excluded.

This can in many cases massively reduce the number of files that IntelliJ IDEA tries to index.

It turns out, this also drastically speeds up searches.

Upvotes: 19

Pat Myron
Pat Myron

Reputation: 4628

Bumping the starting memory up from -Xms200m to -Xms2g and the max memory up from -Xmx600m to -Xmx8g in my .vmoptions file worked for me.

Running this on your terminal:

find / -name *.vmoptions 2>/dev/null

can help you find your .vmoptions file if you're on Mac/Linux.

Upvotes: 0

CrazyCoder
CrazyCoder

Reputation: 401877

First of all, if it's slow for you, it doesn't mean that it's also slow for everyone else. We have different projects, hardware, even "slow" perception could be different.

Every performance problem with IntelliJ IDEA is unique, a solution that helps to one person will not work for another. The only proper way to fix your specific performance problem is by capturing the CPU profiler snapshot as described in this document and sending it to IntelliJ IDEA support team, either by submitting a ticket or directly into the issue tracker.

After the CPU snapshot is analyzed, IntelliJ IDEA team will work on a fix and release a new version which will (hopefully) not be affected by this specific performance problem. The team may also suggest you some configuration change or workaround to remedy the problem based on the analysis of the provided data.

All the other "solutions" (like enabling Power Save mode, changing the highlighting level, disabling plugins) will just hide the real problems that should be fixed instead.

Upvotes: 3

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