I unfortunately have this same problem, most of the time the IDE works great and it's feature set is most definitely nice. However sometimes it just locks right

I unfortunately have this same problem, most of the time the IDE works great and it's feature set is most definitely nice. However sometimes it just locks right up / chugs along, especially with the IdeaVIM emulator -- which isn't that satisfying in itself. My machine is plenty fast (a sibling comment on this thread mentioned to another user that it may be the issue). 2.53GHz Xeon (Quad core, hyperthreading) and 24GB of RAM. All of this has left me using vim + terminal for python development, loading up PyCharm community as a glorified debugger.