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Comment by blorenz | Hacker News Reader

I also can't agree more! IntelliJ IDEs have been my go-to since giving it a try during the End of the World sale in 2013. The IDEs have a robust feature set that makes development a pure joy. That joy has subsided in recent years with performance on Mac Intel. There are several open YouTrack issues regarding this: looking to move to Metal; 4k external monitor performance issues; scrolling.

This release makes the IDE so incredibly fast! Indexing dependencies happens magnitudes faster than Intel version. With many of my projects I have used in it, if you tried to hold your breath from the time you started the IDE until it was ready to begin editing you'd have passed out unconscious. Now, the IDE is ready to begin work quicker than you could recover from a heavy sneeze! It IS a breath of fresh air. Searching all files is about instantaneous; navigating file trees is snappy and responsive; opening Settings modals happens quickly. What a joy!

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That joy has subsided in recent years with performance on Mac Intel. [...] This release makes the IDE so incredibly fast! Indexing dependencies happens magnitudes faster than Intel version.

These must be macOS issues or problems with the limited thermal envelopes ofIntel Macs. I have noticed the same issue with my Intel MacBooks, it's slow and the fans spin loudly.

I never had that issue on Linux with a Ryzen CPU (3700X) though. The JetBrains IDEs are lightning-fast, including indexing. My only gripe is that they do not have native Wayland support and as a result the IDEs are blurry with GNOME fractional scaling.

There are some issues about this in their bug tracker, but the JetBrains personnel either do not seem to understand how the Linux graphics stack works (and come with non-solutions) or say that it is low on their priority list.

I have a ToolBox subscription (among other reasons because IntelliJ is still the best Java IDE). But with the progress that Visual Studio Code makes with e.g. Rust support and JetBrains' slow progress on many issues, I will probably switch to VS Code at some point.

Just to echo that going to Ryzen made a world of difference. I had a big jump from some intel APU part to the 5600x - makes jetbrains much more pleasant.

I'm not planning on switching back over, but others in the family are and Jetbrains packages were always clearly "slow" so speed of the chips actually made a difference to my eyes.

Rendering on 4K displays in MacOS has been broken for five years!

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526

I dropped my everything sub over this and then moved on to vscode once its vim plugin was of equal caliber.

I've been using IntelliJ for over 5 years on 4K displays and never experienced this.

Same here. Would be interested to hear what the issue was when they finally resolve that ticket.

That's weird, I run IntelliJ perfectly fine on a retina MBP with two 1440p displys (so I get to see both HiDPI and rgegular DPI working on the same machine at the same time), and my 4K Dell XPS laptop.

I've had the same problem on the regular MBP Retina display. I have heard before that it may be related to scaling; I scale my display to have the smallest text/largest available real-estate possible. But I gave up on JetBrains before testing that theory.

I run mine on a 2015 13" MBP against an external 1680x1050 display. Changing the scaling on the display helps a little, but it is still laggy like I'm on an intercontinental SSH session.

Most of the features that you point out are IO bound. E.g. indexing dependencies, navigating/ searching files. Are you sure that the speed up is because of the new IDE release and not because of a new laptop?

> IO bound. E.g. indexing dependencies

That's enough HN for me today and I just started...

I'm sure it is a bit of both. I was using the Intel version of the IDE until the release today. It took a long time on my Intel MBP and it also took a long time on my M1 with Intel. The ARM version of the IDE is substantially faster, as it should be. I do realize this is an unscientific anecdotal account of the situation so YMMV.

I have a 2015 MacBook for work and use jet brains. It’s quite snappy and responsive. Id expect it to be better on newer hardware but am left wondering why performance degraded so much for people?

I too use it on an older (2014) mbp, and it is fine for Rubymine.

I highly suspect the performance problems some people experience are due to plugins. When I was doing some Elixir/Phoenix work, the Elixir plugin made it unusable sometimes. Clearly that plugin had some serious issues which would appear at times. I have not had the same performance problems in Rubymine or in vanilla IDEA.

I've had sluggishness on a 2019 MBP with totally vanilla Webstorm, no third-party plugins. It was usable, but bad enough to turn me off and send me back to VSCode.

My work laptop is a 2018 or 19 i5 13" MBP with an Intel GPU. It sometimes feels slower than my old MBP (i7 with Nvidia 680 or somesuch GPU). I doubt the CPU difference is the issue, but perhaps there's enough GPU difference that can cause IDEA to be slower on machines without a dedicated GPU.

Or who knows; could be something about the projects - number or sizes of files, language used and references between files, etc.

It didn't. Many people just want it to be instantaneous they way something like Vim or Sublime is, and it just isn't.

But it's in no way any worse on modern machines that what you see in your 2015 MacBook (I have several Macs and can attest). People complain despite getting better performance than what you get on later Macs/PCs.

The other case is too many / too slow plugins. Not all are made equal. But as far as the core functionality, there has been no regression all the years I'm using it.

I use IntelliJ on a 2015 Macbook pro and an equivalently old Dell Latitude running Ubuntu 20.04. The mac has only an i5 dual core processor with 8GB RAM while the Dell has an i7 quad core processor with 16 GB RAM. I hardly find any performance difference with IntelliJ on both the machines.

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