
3 years later, IntelliJ is still unusably slow on macOS with a 4K display - jaytaylor
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JRE-526
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Timucin
I guess I must say this first: I am not working at JetBrains, not defending or
advertising their products in any way. Just sharing my own experience and
opinions.

I've been using a few products* of JetBrains on MacOS for the last 3 years,
either with 1 or 2 1080p monitors or with an additional 4K monitor but unlike
the rest, I haven't had much problems.

There were times the IDEs were consuming too much CPU and were super sluggish
as described but then, somewhere in their forums, I found that they have
suggested to use the Java suite they have provided with the IDE itself instead
the default one and that solved my problem once and for all.

On the other hand, a colleague of mine had suffered a lot from the very same
products because of slow disk speed. This is not the case for other ~50
engineers I am working with though and all of them are using new Macbook Pros
and JetBrains IDEs.

So I guess it is safe to say that they are usually working OK on modern day
computers.

* PhpStorm, WebStorm, GoLand, IntelliJ

~~~
pharaohgeek
I'm with you. I have 2x28" 4k monitors attached to my MacBook Pro and have had
zero performance issues in IntelliJ, AppCode, or DataGrip.

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tracker1
Related, the ticket system in the link is unreasonably slow on a modern high
speed connected desktop.

I'm a fan of SPA platforms, I've worked on web based applications for nearly
24 years now. 7-8 seconds is way too long for a desktop with a fat data pipe
to wait for a website/webapp. (Cached refresh still over 5 seconds) Should
probably take a few lessons from StackOverflow guys.

~~~
djtriptych
JIRA loading times probably cost the software development industry 8-9 figures
a year in lost productivity.

~~~
tracker1
Didn't even register to me that this was JIRA... not really surprised in the
end... did notice a significant amount of cruft in the app, and it's one API
call that is the bulk of the wait time. Probably related to
passing/parsing/evaluating the permissions around requesting the main payload
for display.

~~~
djtriptych
It's not. I just saw an opportunity to complain about JIRA and jumped at it.

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nottorp
It's not so fast even on a 1920x1200 display. Whatever it's doing in the
background (I'm talking about the Android Studio flavor here), it tends to lag
behind my typing when I know exactly what to write and just hammer at the
keys.

Good thing I have experience from ssh-ing to systems across an ocean back in
the dialup days :)

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
Java is great for server apps where you care more about throughput. But on the
desktop where latency matters, I have yet to use a non-trivial Java
application that didn't have latency issues.

~~~
diebir
IntelliJ is a good example, it does not have latency.

~~~
markdog12
Chronic issue for me. Consistently waiting on WebStorm lag to complete my
typing/commands. May be the vim or other plugins I use, not sure. This is on 2
powerful machines. One Mac, one Windows.

~~~
Timucin
I had the same problem until I download the version that comes with it's on
Java runtime environment. The problem does not exist for me anymore but you'd
like to try to same if it's still a thing.

Also try to disable any installed plugins if you have any. Some old markdown
plugin were causing a stability problem on PhpStorm back then. You may have
experiencing something similar.

One last suggestion: try to move/remove the folder that keeps your settings.

Not sure if any of these would help but may worth to try.

~~~
markdog12
Thx for the suggestions. I’ve tried their jre as well. I’ve disabled almost
all the plugins, except vim.

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abalone
While I am an IntelliJ IDEA fan, this is one area where Eclipse stands out.
Long ago they decided to part ways with pure Java and incorporate native
platform UI via JNI.[1]

[1] [https://www.eclipse.org/swt/](https://www.eclipse.org/swt/)

~~~
bootlooped
I had a professor that was adamant Java IDEs are not written in Java. I
pointed out IntelliJ was written in Java, but he countered that it used native
code under the hood to do the UI. I never investigated this claim any further,
and don't have a strong feeling as to whether it is true or not.

~~~
lokedhs
It's not. IDEA is fully Java. Eclipse, however uses SWT as its graphics
system, which uses native code.

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philwelch
In my experience, the issue is intermittent and seems to be less and less
frequent over time. The problem is that tickets like this rapidly approach a
"legendary" status where if there's even one user anywhere in the world who
runs into this problem, he's going to cause a stink if you close the ticket.

~~~
bunderbunder
Same here. I've certainly had slowness issues with IntelliJ, but I hadn't
noticed any correlation with whether I do or do not have my 4K external
monitor plugged in. Sounds like, surprisingly, cranking down the resolution on
the monitor (which is not something I've tried) makes things _more_ laggy.

I've got to imagine this is a maddening one for JetBrains to deal with.

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diebir
Running IntelliJ on a Macbook with Dell U2718Q every day and right now.
Usually 2-3-4 large projects open. No issues.

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pvinis
Trying to access this from my iPhone I get:

This version of your browser is not supported. Try upgrading to the latest
stable version.

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tracker1
Considering it takes > 7 seconds on a desktop with a fat data pipe, I'm not
surprised.

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nepeckman
Question for anyone who has coded on a 4k display: is it worth it? Is the
scaled image that much sharper, and is that sharpness worth having? I feel
like I still see so many scaling problems, and I'm curious if people feel like
the better display quality is worth it.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Is the scaled image that much sharper

Sharpness is a property of the pixel density, which is separate to the number
of pixels (the 4K part), so it's not really a question which makes sense.

For example I have a 4K screen for coding but it isn't particularly high DPI
because it's physically large at 68 cm so nothing on it is 'scaled' beyond
normal.

~~~
coldtea
Most people buy monitors from a fixed set of sizes (say 23-27 inches) so
within that range 4K means pixel density with not much variation.

And of course, for the same monitor size, compared to 1080p, it would be ~2x
the density, so that's a valid fixed comparison to make too.

In other words, read the parent's question as: "if it worth it to go 4K over
1080p/2K for the same monitor size? Is it noticeably sharper?".

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krferriter
It's slow on Linux with a 4K display too, I don't know if I'd go as far as
"unusable". I don't know what toolkit they're using or what's slowing it down
but it's a really slow UI. It looks nice though.

~~~
kevinherron
Hmm. Not slow for me.

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babyslothzoo
Speaking of unusably slow, loading that website in Chrome on a Mac pegs CPU at
about 110%

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dsabanin
I run IntelliJ and WebStorm on i7 iMac 4k with additional 4k monitor and have
no issues.

I think for me key is RAM size, I set the heap size to 4GB because I work with
big projects and it helps a lot.

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teilo
I run dual LG 4K on a 2018 MPB 15, and am in PyCharm and Datagrip all day. I
am not seeing these issues.

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EngineerBetter
Using Goland and we have no performance problems.

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__m
ruuning rider on an iMac Pro with 5120x2880 display, with no problems so far

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21
Fortunately Electron apps don't have this problem, since their UI is GPU
accelerated.

~~~
aaaaaaaaaaab
Can’t tell if joking or not...

