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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

Maybe your performance issues are caused by plugins? I have no problems using IntelliJ on a base model 12" MacBook (1.1GHz Core M, 8GB RAM, 256GB PCIe SSD). I don't use Symfony2, though.

Side note: I am of the opinion that no matter you're doing, SSDs are a must. If you don't already use one as your primary drive, please upgrade. Once you go SSD, any machine with platters will feel broken. This goes double for laptops, which often contain slower 7200RPM and 5400RPM drives.

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I'm on a ~5 year old Thinkpad (w/ an i5-520m; apparently it benches to roughly the same as the M-5Y31 that's probably in your macbook), but IDEA pins a couple cores on my processor to 100% for half a minute whenever it opens a project and incurs a noticeable delay when tabbing to and from its window. Compared to my work machine, IntelliJ truly crawls.

I suppose I'm asking, have you had _any_ responsiveness problems? Or does it work flawlessly?

How much heap are you allocating? I was seeing unusually poor performance while working with a large project until I bumped the heap up to 4-6g. It still takes a minute when I open the project but is pretty performant otherwise. Also, I've had to invalidate the cache a couple of times when idea was behaving strangely (over a 5 yr or so period)

Good suggestion; I've cranked it up to 5 GB from the default (0.75, iirc) in case the problems were stemming from the garbage collector spinning. Haven't tried it out yet, but thanks :)

5GB could potentially have a detrimental impact as well, instead of there not being enough memory and causing the GC to have to run aggressively you may simply be causing the GC to pause longer when it runs due to a larger heap of dead objects (the default GC is really bad here, G1 is a lot better). Try starting with 1-2GB, increase past if really necessary (it's been more than enough for me, personally).

In practice it seems to be hovering at around 1-2 anyways. On a side note, I really hate that the JVM requires users to be aware of its heap tuning parameters :/

One of the reasons why Java is largely relegated as a server-side language, I feel. I write WPF apps on .Net and I never have to worry about what I need to set for my heap size because the frameworks garbage collector just works as I'd expect it to - do the same thing with JavaFX and I feel like tearing my hair out.

I just timed it, and IntelliJ 15.0.2 took 27 seconds to start up, load a project[1], and finish indexing it. The UI was visible after 17 seconds. As soon as they appeared, UI elements worked fine. I notice no delay or lag when ⌘ + tabbing to IntelliJ.

I'd like it if IntelliJ was faster, but I don't have many qualms with the current level of performance.

1. This project: https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-intellij

Well, startup time aside, it seems like increasing the memory has done the trick? Or it may have all been some subjective nonsense to begin with. In any case, it is at least practice at being patient :)

Is it a big project? In PyCharm at least, the indexing is pretty slow even on my beefier machines. Once that's done it's smooth.

runs flawlessly for me on my 8~ yr old device (some AMD quad core thing). Boot ups are always a bit of a crunch, but afterwards its one of the best performing IDEs I've ever used.

I'm running WebStorm on the same machine, and haven't noticed it being too slow.

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