One thing I've noticed is that CLion seems to at least partially index things in the directory tree even if they're in your excluded set. Seems like a bug, but I gave up fighting with it, and I gave up trying to get the Chromium source tree to be workable in CLion at all, even on a 48-core Xeon with 256GB of RAM (not joking). But my coworker had some success by creating a second directory which was just symlinks for the code he was interested in, and opening CLion on that. Painful, but worked, kinda.

This is a huge one. If PyCharm is indexing one of your PyPi or NPM caches, the memory footprint dwarfs your active code by orders of magnitude.

Thanks. I had done this a while ago and rechecked it. Found a couple of new ones, but nothing major. I'm thinking of abandoning PyCharm altogether. Was really using it mostly for it's great debugger, since I had such a good experience with IDEA, but there's only so much slowness, hanging, and system resource hogging I'll put up with. Maybe it has to do to some degree with the type inference demands of Python. Gonna give Eclipse with PyDev a whirl this weekend.