[schipplock]

  As much as it hurts me to say this, as a fan of JetBrains and its tools, IntelliJ just seems to have become too heavy to run properly on a laptop that’s not at the very higher end of laptops in the early 2020’s.

They advised you to turn off/uninstall plugins, which I did as well. I disabled most of the plugins, even the ones that get shipped by default. For me it improved the performance a lot.

But imho you just need a more powerful computer :). You are obviously missing the features from IntelliJ :).

[dist1ll]

> But imho you just need a more powerful computer :)

Or maybe we need to stop tolerating performance creep and resource bloat?

[vkoskiv]

Precisely. This pervasive attitude of 'duh, just upgrade your hardware' comes across as elitist, and is very toxic. Not everyone can afford to drop several thousand $ every few years just to maintain a tolerable development environment. Software bloat is ruining the world, it's a significant contributor to making people more jaded about technology and making the future seem depressing and lame.

[schipplock]

I'm on your side, but there is not much you can do to convince Jetbrains to make IntelliJ more performant. They are adding more features with every release. You can expect IntelliJ to become slower and slower if you don't upgrade your hardware.

As a user your choice is buying new hardware, or not using IntelliJ. Paulo Renato de Athaydes decided to do the latter :). However, he states that he's missing the features of IntelliJ :). That's why I would buy a more potent computer (or one that has more fans and able to cool down good enough).

[EdwardDiego]

Intellij is using those resources to provide very helpful features.

And they do introduce performance improvements - e.g., downloading pre-existing indexes instead of having to index your entire JDK and Maven repo.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/shared-indexes.html#shar...

[Sohcahtoa82]

That ship has sailed long ago.

These days, Windows Calculator takes over 20 MB to run, despite not significantly changing in functionality since Windows 3.11.

How did we get here?

[jodrellblank]

> "despite not significantly changing in functionality since Windows 3.11."

Here you can run Win 3.1 in a VM in your browser with a click: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows31 and Calculator is in accessories. Make sure to put it in View -> Scientific mode for a full comparison.

Now launch Windows 10 Calculator, you'll see that it is resizable, Win 3.1 calulator can only be minimised. Win 10 shows Unicode characters like Pi, square root, superscript exponentials, Win 3.1 shows them as "x^y" and the letters "PI".

Win 3.1 has a memory. Win 10 has a history log of calculations done, a scrollable editable copyable history and clicking on the entries brings them back to do again.

Win 3.1 has a bug where (2.01 - 2 == 0), Win 10 has that fixed.

Win 3.1 has normal and scientific mode, Win 10 has normal, scientific, date calculation, multiple unit converters, equation graphing with customisable theme, zoomable scrollable live updating high quality, themeable graph.

Win 10 integrates with the Windows contacts in some way to let you share graphed equations with other people. Currency conversion pulls currencies and live rates from the internet.

Win 10 has Programmer mode which does base conversion, logic gates, bit shifting, bitwise number representation with click-to-toggle-bits for entry and viewing.

Win 3.1 calculator is a binary blob, Win 10 calculator is open source MIT licensed on GitHub https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator

[Majestic121]

Even with a middle of the line laptop from 2017, IntelliJ is not that bad.

Disable extra plugins, do not hesitate to mark directories as 'excluded' if you don't need them to pop up in search (especially build directories), and be patient during the 5-10 minutes indexing when you switch to a new project (which should not happen often) is more than enough to get very good perfs.

[LoganDark]

IntelliJ ran great on my MacBook from 2015...

[janlaureys]

I thought I did this as well, but I went to check my plugins after reading this comment and I just disabled at least 30 plugins. Thanks !

[PracticalHelp]

Did you try the last step, for maximum performance? Uninstall IntelliJ? /s