typing kotlin code in intellij AS is sooo slow sob i have an

Question

typing kotlin code in intellij AS is sooo slow sob i have an m1 max with 64GB whyyyyyyy is typing so laggy

ESchouten · Answer

Do you have extremely large libraries as dependency in your project

Colton Idle · Answer

Can t really say what qualifies as large But my projects themselves are like 200kLOC max Nothing insane

ESchouten · Answer

Perhaps you could try increasing the heap size to 2048m <https www jetbrains com help idea increasing memory heap html toolbox|https www jetbrains com help idea increasing memory heap html toolbox>

agrosner · Answer

I have an intel 2019 with 8g heap A project with 100+ modules Autocomplete pretty laggy too

andylamax · Answer

I have somewhat around 20 30 gradle modules a boatload of dependencies more than 50 I can tell Typing ain t lagy but code completion and syntax highlighting takes too long to kick in Nowadays it might take even a full minute to do so

Colton Idle · Answer

Well At least it s not just me A full minute for syntax highlighting and code completion is a regular occurrence

agrosner · Answer

Syntax highlighting is the worst

agrosner · Answer

And worst is when the file has a compile issue it doesn t highlight anything until i fix the last syntax error

agrosner · Answer

That s what I mean is auto complete is really slow

Jurriaan Mous · Answer

Typing is not laggy here on normal M1 Just to make sure is everything running with Apple Silicon architecture Check Activity Monitor if some JDK or maybe IDE itself started with Intel architecture It was in the past easier to download Intel version before UI on website got better

Colton Idle · Answer

Yep I don t even have rosetta installed smile

Colton Idle · Answer

But anyway SOunds like it s not just me Which is good They keep saying the new frontend compiler will fix it But in the latest blog post about this they said the new FE compiler basically has only a 2x improvement A 2x improvement over 1 minute for code completion is still really slow and so I must be missing something right Do the kotlin devs at jetbrains have this sort of slowness too < Alexey Belkov JB > sorry for the ping but I know you helped me out in the past with getting a proper bug report submitted but is this something that any of us can help with reporting or are basically all of these issues known at this point There has to be some plugin or some memory setting we can configure that would speed this up

mcpiroman · Answer

To be fair they mentioned 2x improvement in the whole compilation chain but 4x on the frontend But how will it transfer to the eventual to the IDE plugin is yet another thing Maybe switching to from JRE 11 to 17 in the IDEA will somewhat help

Colton Idle · Answer

< mcpiroman> good point I mustve misread that Thanks for clarifying I might try moving to 17 I ll try anything at this point I thought my company buying me a $4 000 laptop would help but not really lol

agrosner · Answer

couple of things to try increasing IDE memory to over 16GB disabling any nonessential plugins ktlint sonarqube or anything that could analyze your code along with the IDE and unloading unused modules

andylamax · Answer

I have my memory settings to 10GB IDEA my idea hardly gets past 4GB on normal days while observing it has maxed out to 9GB which is why I concluded that this was not a memory problem at all

Daniel Skogquist Åborg · Answer

IntelliJ is just really really REALLY slow on large ish Kotlin projects It becomes totally unusable I ve found no real solution to this except chunking your project up into smaller compilation units modules Hoping for the best here but to be honest the feeling I get is that IDEA is not ready for Kotlin development at corporate scale thinking face

Daniel Skogquist Åborg · Answer

I have a basic 20 kLOC project that takes about 10 minutes to compile whereas one of our Java projects of double the size compiles in seconds man shrugging

agrosner · Answer

comparing just at a language level between two projects is not completely valid i think it really depends on those two projects does kotlin use kapt does java only use reflection build chain compier deps and modularization used will skew those

agrosner · Answer

do they both use same gradle setup

agrosner · Answer

also we re talking about ide code completion navigation etc not compile times

Colton Idle · Answer

FWIW I never had issues with IDE speed with java Kotlin is always the issue

agrosner · Answer

ah certainly gotta be the compiler FE and probably why they decided to work on fixing it

agrosner · Answer

using a semi large typescript project code completion was pretty fast also in past smaller kotlin projects were usually pretty quick miss those days where my hands would cramp with my typing speed

ephemient · Answer

I work on a ~350kLOC pure Kotlin project without much issue it is split up into ~300 modules perhaps no single module being very large has an impact

ephemient · Answer

not related to the IDE the single biggest performance improvement I got was switching from macos to Linux even with a similarly specced machine because filesystem operations are simply faster

ephemient · Answer

some of my coworkers saw improvement by bypassing SIP and gatekeeper some didn t <https news ycombinator com item id=23273247>

christophsturm · Answer

I think one big issue here is that ist not documented what exactly makes editing kotlin files so slow in idea why it is acceptable for some project and totally unacceptable slow for others Also maybe some people are just used to it being so slow Maybe idea should just automatically submit a performance snapshot when code completion takes more than 1 second

Anton Yalyshev [JB] · Answer

gt what exactly makes editing kotlin files so slow in idea actually we described some reasons of slow performance that may be fixed by a user You can see them here <https blog jetbrains com kotlin 2021 06 simple steps for improving your ide performance tips> And also sometimes our perf engineers find abuse of star imports in files If you use just only some not much declaration from a package it s better to define them in imports block directly and not use for the whole package What about other reasons they usually lies somewhere in interaction with indexes or compiler resolve And there s no much ideas how it can be improved on user side For IntelliJ Kotlin plugin team IDE performance is top 1 priority and most of our current tasks are about its improving

christophsturm · Answer

that article seems very general and not tied to kotlin performance I recently edited a pure java project in idea and its just so snappy if ide performance is no1 priority what do you think about automatically submitting a perf snapshot when autocompletion takes more than 1 second Idea already treats a non responsive ui as a bug so why not treat that as a bug too

Colton Idle · Answer

Interesting in imports can cause slowness I wonder if there s an easy way to catch prevent

ephemient · Answer

I believe ktlint and detekt both do in their default configuration

agrosner · Answer

we have a ktlint and detekt

agrosner · Answer

and thus no star imports anywhere

Colton Idle · Answer

< agrosner> and you still have really slow auto complete right

agrosner · Answer

Yeah it s brutal

agrosner · Answer

Most of time faster to just type without waiting And some files just completely fail to syntax highlight autocomplete if there s any compile issue in the file

andylamax · Answer

Same here I now even have memorised most of my import statements I don t wait for auto complete anymore

Alexey Belkov [JB] · Answer

< Colton Idle> It s impossible to say is this a known issue or not unfortunately It s better to report issues like this to YouTrack with as much information to diagnose as possible At least the CPU snapshot see

Colton Idle · Answer

Thanks Alexey I will try to file a bug here with the instructions you sent and i hope others in this thread can do the same cheers

Colton Idle · Answer

< Alexey Belkov JB > is there any way to diagnose why a file is essentially stuck Analyzing Here s my AS activity monitor

Colton Idle · Answer

I captured a cpu ` snapshot` as recommended above but I don t know how to open read the file 1 I would love to open the file and read it myself to know if theres somethign small stupid its stuck on 2 Before I make a bug report I want to make sure no personal info is in it

Alexey Belkov [JB] · Answer

You can open such a file with YourKit profiler for example For analyzing check IDE logs there may be some exception from Kotlin compiler

Colton Idle · Answer

Thank you