IntelliJ 10 performance tuning on Mac OSX

This might help:

IntelliJ is my favorite Java IDE ever! It sees dead code you know  I use a Macbook pro 13″ and that is another love. These two things have made me a happy software engineer for the last two years, but…

One thing I have noticed, though, since working with the full IntelliJ IDEA 10 installation is that it was getting slower and often the spinning beach ball of doom would appear with disconcerting regularity. It even froze on me completely a couple of times with 100% CPU usage for so long I had to kill it. That just doesn’t happen with IntelliJ!

On top of that after an upgrade to the newest Java preview version for the Mac (10.6 update 4 dp10m3308) IntelliJ wouldn’t start at all anymore. Nothing Nada… complete shock! Is IntelliJ deserting me?

No of course not. Jetbrains would never do that to me, right?

After a great mail discussion with Serge Baranov about this last issue and a post here we solved this problem.

In short I had to edit the Info.plist file in the IntelliJ app folder (/Applications/IntelliJ IDEA 10.app/Contents/Info.plist) and adjust the following:

<code>&lt;key&gt;JVMArchs&lt;/key&gt; &lt;array&gt; &lt;string&gt;i386&lt;/string&gt; &lt;string&gt;x86_64&lt;/string&gt; &lt;string&gt;ppc&lt;/string&gt; &lt;/array&gt; </code>

<key>LSArchitecturePriority</key> <array> <string>i386</string> <string>x86_64</string> <string>ppc</string> </array>

Leave only x86_64 so that it becomes:

<code>&lt;key&gt;JVMArchs&lt;/key&gt; &lt;array&gt; &lt;string&gt;x86_64&lt;/string&gt; &lt;/array&gt; </code>

<key>LSArchitecturePriority</key> <array> <string>x86_64</string> </array>

After this adjustment IntelliJ worked fine again, but now I still had that performance issue… Let me explain. On a mac I start IntelliJ once and never close it again until I am forced to reboot my mac once every month or so due to an upgrade or some such. Well since v10 I was not not able to do that anymore. After about a day it started to become really slow. So what to do…

After a bit of browsing and searching I think I have found the solution. Again edit the Info.plist file (same as above) and adjust the VMOptionsoption to give it more memory:

<code>&lt;string&gt;-Xms512m -Xmx768m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -ea -agentlib:yjpagent=disablej2ee,disablecounts,disablealloc, sessionname=IntelliJIdea10 -Xbootclasspath/a:../lib/boot.jar&lt;/string&gt; </code>

(it should be on 1 line!)

For now I don’t seem to have any problems anymore.

Hope this helps you Mac and IntelliJ lovers out there!

 

The not starting bug has been fixed as of the Early Access Program build: IntelliJ IDEA 10.0.2 EAP (build 103.39).
I still edit the VMOptions as described above though.

 

Original post: here