VSCode practically unusable with slow intellisense without using extensions

Question

VSCode on my Macbook Pro is practically unusable due to the intellisense being ungodly slow. This includes:

• hovering to find typescript types, inferred and explicit types
• autocomplete variables/functions/etc
• autocomplete for using shortcuts
• error lines shown in editor

For example, I will have an error show. Something like "variable not defined" or something simple. But then when I go to rewrite the code, it takes forever for VSCode to catch up. Sometimes I have to let it sit 40-50seconds before it catches up with my changes. Hovering over typescript types is practically impossible at times and utterly useless. Below is a screenshot of the "lag" - changes were made, but it stuck like this for 30+ seconds:

• It may be the specific project, because I can't recreate it for smaller projects. However, its only a 200k line project.
• No specific extensions are slowing down VScode
• I tried downgrading VsCode with no help

VSCODE VERSION: 1.47.3

Answer 1

I got stuck with this issue too. All the features driven by typescript language features seemed to be as fast as a turtle. And thanks to Ali Bdeir, I tried to disable all the extensions, though I have only Postman, Inline Sql, JavaScript and Typescript Nightly, Javascript Debugger (nightly), Pretty typescript errors and WSL extensions beside the couple of dozens of themes.

And yes, voila. After restarting VS Code all the goodness got back to its nature. Interesting, I enabled above mentioned extensions one by one, restarting vs code each time, and haven't got this bug back. So I got to guess that some theme extension broke intellisense, but at this point I have no more details. Happy coding dudes.

Answer 2

In my case, the issue was GitLens. I was able to isolate this issue by using the Command Palette (Control + Shift + P) to disable all extensions (this will not uninstall them), restarted Visual Studio, then checked if the issue persists.

The issue did indeed persist, so I went into the Extensions tab and filtered by @disabled:

By reenabling my extensions one by one, I found GitLens to be the culprit.