[andy_ppp]

400% CPU on PyCharm for me... I am super impressed with the features of this IDE; for me personally the jetbrains ones are my favourite, but whatever the setup on this Mac they are too slow for me to use.

Since moving to VSCode my laptop battery lasts a couple of hours longer :-/

[alangpierce]

I use PyCharm and WebStorm regularly without having persistent high CPU usage, although I've seen other people run into it.

Maybe you've already tried this, but one thing that I've found is that the JVM heap size is sometimes set too low, especially when working in a large project. You enable the memory indicator in the bottom right ("Window: Show Memory Indicator" from the Cmd+Shift+A menu) to see the current and max memory usage, and you can click it to manually trigger a GC. If your heap is too low, you'll GC a lot, which can easily cause CPU spikes.

There are details on how to set the heap size here: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/2016.2/tuning-pycharm... . But the short version is that (on Mac) I made a pycharm.vmoptions file at ~/Library/Preferences/PyCharm2016.3/pycharm.vmoptions and it includes the line "-Xmx3000m", which sets the heap size to 3GB.

[andy_ppp]

I've literally tried changing all the JVM settings to be higher and it has zero effect.

[jabzd]

I was at 600% CPU and 5GB of RAM with 3 project windows open, for IntelliJ Ultimate (we hop between a lot of languages so this is easiest). This was with most inspections turned off!

I've also moved to VSCode and haven't looked back. My whole team is currently evaluating VSCode. That is ~$600/mo in subscriptions to IntelliJ Ultimate if everyone decides to move to VSCode - which is looking likely.

[holtalanm]

depending on language, VSCode will be vastly inferior.

If using Java, Groovy, Kotlin, or Scala, Intellij will be much more valuable in terms of time-saving than the $600/mo subscription savings.

For most other languages, VSCode is easily almost on par with Intellij.

[jabzd]

Totally agreed on the value-add for those languages. We'll probably keep one license around for the times we drop into Java for Android which is fairly infrequent. Otherwise, we're a mix of JS (NodeJs/React/Appcelerator/etc), Ruby (via Puppet), HTML/CSS, PHP, Python, etc. IntelliJ was overkill in the first place but the one IDE to rule them all is just too compelling to not give it ago. Worked for 2 years, the product has just gotten too slow now.

My gut reaction is that IntelliJ's indexing isn't yet properly optimized for the small-file dependency-hell that JS dev has turned into.

The unfortunate thing was that we were willing to upgrade to the newest Macbooks if they had 32GB of RAM and hope that helped (in addition to some VM woes for working on infrastructure) - probably would have kept IntelliJ in play but the swapping and it using 33% of RAM on our machines made it an easy target to try to replace.

In comparison, VSCode is using 70MB RAM on my machine currently with 6 projects open.

[rootlocus]

> we were willing to upgrade to the newest Macbooks if they had 32GB of RAM

Any specific reasons why you're not considering PCs and linux?

[jabzd]

90% iOS app development, 10% familiarity.

We're a small shop so we have one team that does everything so one machine for all contexts is starting to be a pain. We did at least dust off some mac minis to do puppet (lots of virtual machines) work on those when possible to free up some RAM on our app dev machines.

[rootlocus]

> For most other languages, VSCode is easily almost on par with Intellij

That's a bold claim, considering the fact that most languages that have support from the Intellij platform benefit from refactor tools, quick fixes, linting, and code navigation. I'm not familiar with VS, but if it's anything like Sublime Text, Atom, etc. it probably only has syntax highlighting, some dumb auto complete and very basic navigation.

Also, don't forget Intellij has pretty decent support for Python, PHP, C#, C++, Rust, Clojure (all languages are personally tested) and even integrated git and db clients. Personally, I split my git activity between CLI and IDEA, but I have to confess, the IDEA client is the best I've used: integrated merge / diff tools, annotations, easy to browse logs etc.

[vorg]

> If using Java, Groovy, Kotlin, or Scala, Intellij will be much more valuable in terms of time-saving

Any IDE is more helpful for programming in statically-typed languages, which Java, Kotlin, or Scala are. Apache Groovy, also on your list, is dynamically-typed originally -- though static typing was added in Groovy 2, virtually no-one uses it -- so I question if any IDE, whether IntelliJ or VS, really gives time-savings there. Anyway, such dynamically typed languages like Groovy are good for glue code, build scripts, and testing, not for developing actual systems.

[yread]

It's not only on Mac, on this Windows machine with i7 and 16GB of RAM music playback starts stuttering when IDEA does its thing. I still like it though

[realharo]

I often have to work with C++ code at work, so I'm all too familiar with music and video stuttering during compilation.

I usually just use procexp to give the music player process higher priority, which solves the problem (although not permanently).

[andybak]

Weird. I've usually got 3 or 4 projects open in PyCharm and I'm seeing CPU usage like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/88crexgbaf7s042/Screenshot%202016-...

(hovers around 0.5% for PyCharm with occasional spikes up to 40-50%)

[LoneWolf]

I find it surprising that some people complain about performance, here even with two large Java projects I only get that kind of CPU % when building indexes (only after importing a project or dependency adjustments) and its only for a few minutes.

Maybe a specific Python project thing?

[nogridbag]

As someone else mentioned, if you switch branches, IntelliJ will need reindex everything. I switch branches several times per day on some projects and it's annoying enough where I considered switching over to light weight editor.

[estefan]

Scala in Intellij blasts my CPU. People near me know when I'm working on scala because my mac nearly takes off the fan runs so much...

[eklavya]

Good to know that's a thing, I thought I had misconfigured it somehow. Waiting for the Scala IDE rebase on vscode.