Maybe your performance issues are caused by plugins? I have no problems using IntelliJ on a base model 12" MacBook (1.1GHz Core M, 8GB RAM, 256GB PCIe SSD). I don't use Symfony2, though.

Side note: I am of the opinion that no matter you're doing, SSDs are a must. If you don't already use one as your primary drive, please upgrade. Once you go SSD, any machine with platters will feel broken. This goes double for laptops, which often contain slower 7200RPM and 5400RPM drives.

I'm on a ~5 year old Thinkpad (w/ an i5-520m; apparently it benches to roughly the same as the M-5Y31 that's probably in your macbook), but IDEA pins a couple cores on my processor to 100% for half a minute whenever it opens a project and incurs a noticeable delay when tabbing to and from its window. Compared to my work machine, IntelliJ truly crawls.

I suppose I'm asking, have you had _any_ responsiveness problems? Or does it work flawlessly?

How much heap are you allocating? I was seeing unusually poor performance while working with a large project until I bumped the heap up to 4-6g. It still takes a minute when I open the project but is pretty performant otherwise. Also, I've had to invalidate the cache a couple of times when idea was behaving strangely (over a 5 yr or so period)

Good suggestion; I've cranked it up to 5 GB from the default (0.75, iirc) in case the problems were stemming from the garbage collector spinning. Haven't tried it out yet, but thanks :)

5GB could potentially have a detrimental impact as well, instead of there not being enough memory and causing the GC to have to run aggressively you may simply be causing the GC to pause longer when it runs due to a larger heap of dead objects (the default GC is really bad here, G1 is a lot better). Try starting with 1-2GB, increase past if really necessary (it's been more than enough for me, personally).

In practice it seems to be hovering at around 1-2 anyways. On a side note, I really hate that the JVM requires users to be aware of its heap tuning parameters :/

One of the reasons why Java is largely relegated as a server-side language, I feel. I write WPF apps on .Net and I never have to worry about what I need to set for my heap size because the frameworks garbage collector just works as I'd expect it to - do the same thing with JavaFX and I feel like tearing my hair out.

I just timed it, and IntelliJ 15.0.2 took 27 seconds to start up, load a project[1], and finish indexing it. The UI was visible after 17 seconds. As soon as they appeared, UI elements worked fine. I notice no delay or lag when ⌘ + tabbing to IntelliJ.

I'd like it if IntelliJ was faster, but I don't have many qualms with the current level of performance.

1. This project: https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-intellij

Well, startup time aside, it seems like increasing the memory has done the trick? Or it may have all been some subjective nonsense to begin with. In any case, it is at least practice at being patient :)

Is it a big project? In PyCharm at least, the indexing is pretty slow even on my beefier machines. Once that's done it's smooth.

runs flawlessly for me on my 8~ yr old device (some AMD quad core thing). Boot ups are always a bit of a crunch, but afterwards its one of the best performing IDEs I've ever used.

I'm running WebStorm on the same machine, and haven't noticed it being too slow.

Your issues are related to the number of plugins being loaded.

I primarily write Java in my professional life, using IntelliJ Ultimate Edition. I have to do so on a MacBook Pro with SSD to be productive.

Lately I primarily write Go in my personal life. I use the free IntelliJ Community Edition (with Go plugin only) on all my devices. On a CHROMEBOOK with 2 GB of RAM running Crouton, my experience with Community Edition is almost as snappy as my 16 GB MacBook experience with Ultimate Edition.

You can radically speed up your IntelliJ environment by being more judicious in which plugins you enable. Quite honestly, lately I've wondered why I bother with Ultimate Edition at all... since the only non-free plugins I really use are for HTML and JavaScript support (and even those only rarely). If my company wants to pay for an Ultimate license and a MacBook on which to run it, then I'll gladly use them... but if it were my money I'd probably just stick to Community Edition for my needs.

Similar experience. I usually use IntelliJ in my Macbook. But when I had to code on an enterprise laptop with 4 GB RAM (with many enterprise bloatware), I was surprised IntelliJ performed so well. That too, I was working on 10 modules.

Great advice. I have the "everything" JetBrains license but I still keep an up to date community edition IntelliJ installed with no plugins but Clojure - definitely plugins that are not used should not be installed.

If the project is not enormous a simple hard disk is ok. A lot of RAM is much more important than SSD. Sure indexing the first time takes enough time for you to go grab a coffee but otherwise it runs pretty fast.

That's not unusual for any app based on the JVM.

Reminds me of the time I installed Visual Studio 2015. That pig sprayed over 30 GB of files onto my HDD and still needed 3rd party plugins to be on the same level as IntelliJ.

That's a bit excessive, did you install all of the vs stuff (all languages & tools including c++, office dev tools, silverlight, light switch etc)? If you just choose C# it's a bit better (though still big). And yes you still need Resharper, ironically made by JetBrains, for it to be on the level of IntelliJ.

VS2015's installer is notoriously uncustomisable - it installs a bunch of useless stuff without letting you choose.

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

It's amazing how one man's "pig" can be a ton of other people's "best IDE that there is".

At least in the case of Visual Studio...I don't hear quite as many people naming IntelliJ as "the best". Not even close.

The only people I hear calling Visual Studio "the best" are usually .NET developers. Considering their lack of choices I'm not surprised.

Anecdotal counterpoint: I develop java and python at work, C# and C++ at home, use / have used Eclipse, IntelliJ, ST + plugins, vim, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio for development. Of all of the above, I've found that Visual Studio is by far the most pleasant to work in environment (for C# and C++), hands down.

That has nothing to do with the JVM. It's simply a result of it being a very feature-rich IDE.

It may. Java io stack is quite bad at certain tasks like crawling files and tracking changes.

On my experience, the blame is more between chair, keyboard and monitor than with JVM itself, given the typical codebases I have to review for quality issues.

eh, any app that maintains compatibility with jdks < 7 can't use the WatchService and it's low level system specific API, which includes buttload of enterprise app and but the most recents IDE that are starting to drop jdk 6 support.

then there is indeed the PEBCAK as you say, but you can't really blame people that knows the proper solutions if they have weird jdk to support.

Just two examples of such PEBCAK quality:

- Using a for loop to copy array contents instead of System.arraycopy()

- Doing everything on the main thread in Swing

There are plenty more that I can list and they never have anything to do with JDK versions.

That problem was solved in the JDK five years ago. If you're required to support a ten-year-old, EOL-ed platform because people don't upgrade, that's still not the JVM's fault...

If it were for rational people, we wouldn't have spring beans application around. World isn't built on technical excellence.

Java UI is sluggish and looks strange unlike OS native UIs.

To speed up IntelliJ products, immediately open Settings -> Directories and exclude all unnecessary folders. Otherwise a crawler background process will indexes every file, and it consumes a lot of CPU and IO resources.

In one extreme example, my project was a scraper that scraped in 80k images or so, and IntelliJ was essentially unusable until I did this (16 gig of ram, SSD, i7 quad core etc), and completely fine afterwards.

So if anyone is having performance problems, please do check this out.

what kind of scraping project was it?

Steam sales - I posted it here a while back. Clojure + Reagent site - http://www.hydralist.com

In my RubyMine, it's named "Project Structure".

Excluding the log directory is extra important. It's empty when you create the project, but will probably keep growing and gradually slow everything down the more you work.

Great advice! I need to exclude large data-only folders in my project directories and if I sometimes forget to do this then the IDE is not as performant.

Got any more detailed instructions for this? I'm running the OSX version of IntelliJ, I can't see this option anywhere

File -> Settings -> search for "direct"

Depending on the product version the settings dialog is a bit different: https://www.google.com/#q=intellij+exclude+folders

Right click the directory -> mark directory as -> excluded.