Why is IntelliJ 13 IDEA so slow after upgrading from version 12?

Question

While using IntelliJ 13 ultimate edition for a week, it just seems really slow.

First of all, the whole IDE stops for a second or so every once in a while. The Java

Answer 1

Editing the idea.vmoptions file is only a temporary solution until the next product update. See the JetBrains help pages for a more permanent solution to setting these values via the vm settings - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/tuning-the-ide.html

Answer 2

For me the problem was a nodes_modules folder with more than thousand files. I had to mark the directory as excluded.

Also see this list of possible problems.

Answer 3

My particular case: I had a number of method breakpoints while I was running my code in debug mode, which made my intelliJ slow.

Answer 4

I noticed that disabling many of the plug ins really helps speed up IntelliJ. For example, I am not developing Android Applications. Turning the plugins related to Android development off speed up load time and makes the program run much smoother on my machine.

Answer 5

In my case massive performance degradation was caused by IntelliJ unintentionally using JDK/JRE 1.8. This seems to affect rendering performance quite badly and also leads to some unexpected crashes and deadlocks.

This would render the IDE unusable (latency of 1-2s on operations) for even a small ~3KLOC project.

Just ensure you are using JDK/JRE 1.7 when running intellij:

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0_67 intellij

(or whatever the equivalent is for your OS)

You can check the JRE that is being used to run intellij under Help -> About -> JRE.

Answer 6

I've been using 13 since early beta and I have no problems at all. Perhaps it's your specific settings. Maybe your project has grown over time and the memory you gave Idea originally isn't sufficient for it now? Try giving Idea more memory to work with: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/increasing-memory-heap.html (instructions on how to do that).