That sounds like you have a config issue. Maybe indexing is turned off? Do you get mem low errors? https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/increasing-memory-heap.h...

It really has no issue as long as you have enough RAM and disabled swap. I recently got a fairly decent gaming laptop that I'm supposed to develop on and the 16 GB RAM is constantly full and it's swapping all the time, browser keeps suspending my background tabs, really pain in the ass.

You really do not want to disable swap on Linux. The operating system does not handle out of memory situations well at all if you do.

At any rate, I've got 32 GB of ram and I'm operating off an NVMe-drive, I really don't see what the problem is.

Possibly dumb question, have you adjusted the maximum memory heap size that the JVM can allocate for running IntelliJ?

You're right, I should've mentioned this only applies to Windows pagefile rather than swap.

Hmm, just checked. The two projects I have open now have 510 KLOC and the other one 200 KLOC, and searching in both feels instant. (This is not including node_modules and python libraries/caches that it also searches through by default)

Do you have indexing turned off for your project or has indexing not completed? Indexing speeds up your searches.

It works great for me with much larger projects.

Same experience unfortunately. As much as I love Jetbrains, these features dont scale with codebases like the microservice I worked on at my X 10s of billions of dollars market cap tech company, where our codebase was maybe the 10th largest.