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> On my top-of-the-line Mac M1 with 64GB of RAM and 10 CPU cores, everything feels lightweight and smooth [...] But when I am at home and want to work on a hobb

by rob74 4y ago

> On my top-of-the-line Mac M1 with 64GB of RAM and 10 CPU cores, everything feels lightweight and smooth [...] But when I am at home and want to work on a hobby project, I prefer to use my less powerful laptops [...] after just an hour or so writing code and running tests using IntelliJ, the laptop becomes unusably hot. The fans get louder and louder until it’s really annoying. To add my anecdotal evidence: I have a relatively new Dell Core i7 laptop with "only" 16 GB of RAM, and while using IntelliJ IDEs "normally" (i.e. not while it's updating its cache), the CPU usage rarely goes above 5%. So the impression that you need top of the line hardware for running IntelliJ products that the blog post is giving is a bit exaggerated...

jeroenhd 4y ago
There could be some kind of limitation on Apple's chips, there are complaints across the Internet of IntelliJ being slow on Mac despite the power of the M-series SoCs. It could be that there are optimisations to be made in their JVM for generating ARM code. Disabling plugins helps a lot, though. On install you'll get a screen that let's you select tons of features that had me going "gimme gimme gimme" but in hindsight I've never used 90% of them. For example, Android support is a major plugin I've never used with Idea because Android Studio exists and seems to integrate much better. Disabling that cut down startup time by a noticeable amount when I last culled my install. My experience with tricked out command line editors has been that they start out blazing fast but as you add more and more features (syntax highlighting, linting, etc.) they become slower than your average IDE. They're still responsive when they're not doing anything, but sometimes they just need a few seconds to think, breaking up my work flow. Another issue that I've seen some people run into is that IntelliJ will index all your files. If you have some kind of process that slows down your computer when you're opening tons of tiny files (say, an antivirus program or a project stored in a hard drive) that can instantly kill your work flow. The only alternative seems to be to postpone loading all the files until you start searching (which VS Code seems to do) but then you're just moving the problem around, not really fixing it. It's what I get for using a text editor for an IDE, I suppose. My experience with Jetbrains tools is that they're a lot more powerful than most of the competition at the cost of some minor input latency during heavy operations such as indexing.
jansan 4y ago
I am using a seven year old ThinkPad T550 with 16MB and onboard graphics, because I know that if it runs fast on my machine, it runs fast almost everywhere else. IntelliJ is very usable with that configuration, except the terminal (as I wrote in another comment).

by rob74 4y ago

jeroenhd 4y ago

There could be some kind of limitation on Apple's chips, there are complaints across the Internet of IntelliJ being slow on Mac despite the power of the M-series SoCs. It could be that there are optimisations to be made in their JVM for generating ARM code. Disabling plugins helps a lot, though. On install you'll get a screen that let's you select tons of features that had me going "gimme gimme gimme" but in hindsight I've never used 90% of them. For example, Android support is a major plugin I've never used with Idea because Android Studio exists and seems to integrate much better. Disabling that cut down startup time by a noticeable amount when I last culled my install. My experience with tricked out command line editors has been that they start out blazing fast but as you add more and more features (syntax highlighting, linting, etc.) they become slower than your average IDE. They're still responsive when they're not doing anything, but sometimes they just need a few seconds to think, breaking up my work flow. Another issue that I've seen some people run into is that IntelliJ will index all your files. If you have some kind of process that slows down your computer when you're opening tons of tiny files (say, an antivirus program or a project stored in a hard drive) that can instantly kill your work flow. The only alternative seems to be to postpone loading all the files until you start searching (which VS Code seems to do) but then you're just moving the problem around, not really fixing it. It's what I get for using a text editor for an IDE, I suppose. My experience with Jetbrains tools is that they're a lot more powerful than most of the competition at the cost of some minor input latency during heavy operations such as indexing.

jansan 4y ago

I am using a seven year old ThinkPad T550 with 16MB and onboard graphics, because I know that if it runs fast on my machine, it runs fast almost everywhere else. IntelliJ is very usable with that configuration, except the terminal (as I wrote in another comment).