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Comment by fauntle | Hacker News Reader

I keep seeing this complaint but I have never reproduced it locally. VSCode runs at a buttery smooth 120hz on my MBP. What are you doing that causes such poor performance?

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It's extensions. Some of them can drag a machine to its knees, with unbounded CPU usage. The worst is the C++ extensions. Gets stuck at 100% CPU if you open a file it doesn't like, which is most of them.

VSCode with no extensions is very fast and light. VSCode with 30 extensions you've accumulated? Not so much.

I think that's why you see such conflicting experiences - people have different extensions.

I think I have like, 50 extensions though not all of them are active at the same time (that's how vscode works I think) and I don't really see the lag. I have a high refresh rate screen, I'm pretty used to differentiating between laggy and non laggy graphics, etc and still nothing stands out. Maybe some extensions are resource hogs but I think vscode provides stats about extension resource usage and how much an extension slows down the editor so people can easily check what is causing their slowdowns.

I regularly must sit and wait for vscode to catch up rendering the text I just typed. I suspect the main culprit is the vim extension, but unfortunately that's one of the few extensions I cannot go without.

Ah yes the vim extension is known to be an issue. IIRC the problem is it works by hooking into every key press and blocks VSCode in a way that no other extensions really do.

Actually I think Rust analyser had a "smart enter" feature that worked in a similar way and was similarly slow.

Basically if an extension overrides typing then it's going to be slow.

Yeah, that god damn cpptools intellisense scanner seems to grab one core and peg it for 10’s of minutes after deigning to break an include. I don’t get what it’s doing in there that it can’t at least get spread out over more cores; as-is, it spools up the fan because you’ve got one cpu melting while the rest of the processor is just chilling.

I absolutely love vscode and think all of the people complaining about it being sluggish are ridiculous, but the cpp extensions really are genuinely annoying.

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