[gadr90]

I would love it if they focused on performance improvements and making the editor more lightweight overall. I love WebStorm, but even on my beastly XPS running nothing but it and Chrome, it sometimes hangs doing nothing. I'm starting to investigate other editors such as Atom because of this. I find it hard to believe that a quad core, modern computer can possibly have a hard time running a text editor.

[viraptor]

Google a bit for adjusting GC settings in idea - stuff like http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2006/04/configuring-intellij-... (old, but check the comments). I'm not using it anymore, so can't find what I ended up with, but adjusting the startup options made a huge difference 2 years ago.

I think I also went for one of the experimental/less stable concurrent collectors - didn't find any issues in practice.

[specialist]

+1 I bumped up heap space to min 1g max 2b. Now this beast of a Spring heavy project (day job) doesn't hang IntelliJ ("indexing...").

Seems to me these IDEs could suggest reasonable JVM options after profiling your project.

Or at least put the JVM options in the preferences, so I don't have to dig around the install/distro.

[gadr90]

Thanks for that, I will try that out right now.

[maaaats]

I have opposite experiences. Compared with other big IDEs IntelliJ gives much more help/features compared to resources used, for me.

[lazzlazzlazz]

My relatively old laptop runs IntelliJ and PyCharm like a dream... Atom runs sluggishly. I ditched Atom quickly.

[aespinoza]

Also do realize that Atom is not as mature as PyCharm. Don't dismiss Atom so fast. Give it some time and try it again.

Disclaimer: I love PyCharm, and I actually would not replace it with Atom. I believe PyCharm is the best IDE for Python, but Atom has its uses.

[userbinator]

Is it a CPU bottleneck (cores being at 100% would be a good sign of this), or memory running low and causing swapfile use (high HDD activity)? Without any further info I'm leaning toward the latter, as you have both a Java application and a browser possibly running lots of JavaScript, and both being GC'd languages means they'll be competing for memory rather aggressively.

[gadr90]

I never bothered to check, but I think it's probably memory. Sorry for the delay to reply, I'm on vacations!

[Glide]

Atom uses a lot of resources compared to other text editors. IDEs aren't just text editors though. WebStorm is probably slower than people's experience with IDEA because the languages you use on it don't play to an IDE's strengths.

[thejosh]

Agreed, I run on Ubuntu for my main machine and it performs quite badly under that, and the fonts are terrible.

Yes you can patch them using some system wide font fix, but that makes everything else look like garbage.

[papaf]

Have you installed the Oracle JVM? By default Ubuntu uses OpenJDK.

[gadr90]

I use Oracle JVM, by the way.

[tomjen3]

I had that problem with webstorm. You can tweak the gc settings.

[tobltobs]

Are you using windows?

[gadr90]

Ubuntu 14.04. Sorry for the delay, I'm on vacations!