3 years later, IntelliJ is still unusably slow on macOS with a 4K display

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JRE-526

by jaytaylor • 7 years ago

67 63 7 years ago

youtrack.jetbrains.com

pvinis• 7 years ago

Trying to access this from my iPhone I get:

This version of your browser is not supported. Try upgrading to the latest stable version.

tracker17• 7 years ago

Considering it takes > 7 seconds on a desktop with a fat data pipe, I'm not surprised.

tracker17• 7 years ago

Related, the ticket system in the link is unreasonably slow on a modern high speed connected desktop.

I'm a fan of SPA platforms, I've worked on web based applications for nearly 24 years now. 7-8 seconds is way too long for a desktop with a fat data pipe to wait for a website/webapp. (Cached refresh still over 5 seconds) Should probably take a few lessons from StackOverflow guys.

djtriptych2• 7 years ago

JIRA loading times probably cost the software development industry 8-9 figures a year in lost productivity.

tracker17• 7 years ago

Didn't even register to me that this was JIRA... not really surprised in the end... did notice a significant amount of cruft in the app, and it's one API call that is the bulk of the wait time. Probably related to passing/parsing/evaluating the permissions around requesting the main payload for display.

reaperducer• 7 years ago

JIRA loading times probably cost the software development industry 8-9 figures a year in lost productivity.

Wrike isn't far behind.

/Upload failed? Must be a day ending in "y".

tracker17• 7 years ago

1.1mb of JS actually isn't that bad all things considered... (ugh, angular...)

Looks like an eventSourceBus request is the culprit... it's passing a huge payload on the querystring... Man, have to love "Enterprise" development.

I don't mean to be especially snarky or mean here... I've just spent my entire career for over half my life now developing web based applications across the stack with care. I've been a proponent of SPA for applications and it really is disheartening to see something work so badly. It could be the effect of HN, but even then it's just so many indications that this whole thing is a bloated mess that typically comes from an "enterprise" architect/developer mindset that makes me sad as someone in the practice.

StavrosK• 7 years ago

It's showing two whole kilobytes of text, there's an upper bound on how fast such vast volumes of data can be displayed, you know.

It frustrates me how little pride in their craft the average worker displays, in any industry.

tracker17• 7 years ago

The bulk of that is comments.. ready event (and first paint) is around 4-5s in... There's no reason the bulk of the page couldn't have been loaded in well under 1s, and have the comments load after.

edit: sorry, didn't realize you were being sarcastic at first.

babyslothzoo• 7 years ago

Speaking of unusably slow, loading that website in Chrome on a Mac pegs CPU at about 110%

nottorp2• 7 years ago

It's not so fast even on a 1920x1200 display. Whatever it's doing in the background (I'm talking about the Android Studio flavor here), it tends to lag behind my typing when I know exactly what to write and just hammer at the keys.

Good thing I have experience from ssh-ing to systems across an ocean back in the dialup days :)

philwelch• 7 years ago

In my experience, the issue is intermittent and seems to be less and less frequent over time. The problem is that tickets like this rapidly approach a "legendary" status where if there's even one user anywhere in the world who runs into this problem, he's going to cause a stink if you close the ticket.

bunderbunder3• 7 years ago

Same here. I've certainly had slowness issues with IntelliJ, but I hadn't noticed any correlation with whether I do or do not have my 4K external monitor plugged in. Sounds like, surprisingly, cranking down the resolution on the monitor (which is not something I've tried) makes things _more_ laggy.

I've got to imagine this is a maddening one for JetBrains to deal with.

nepeckman• 7 years ago

Question for anyone who has coded on a 4k display: is it worth it? Is the scaled image that much sharper, and is that sharpness worth having? I feel like I still see so many scaling problems, and I'm curious if people feel like the better display quality is worth it.

llukas• 7 years ago

(imho) difference is as night and day - once you start with 4k there is no turning back...

tananaev• 7 years ago

+1. After getting a 4k display at work, I decided I need to get one home as well. It's so much nicer.

imwally• 7 years ago

If you're on macOS, absolutely. Linux, maybe not. It's really hard for me to go back to a non-retina screen. I'm using a 2018 15" MBP which ships with a default scaled resolution of 1680x1050 which upscales the screen and in my opinion isn't as clear as the 1:1 pixels of 1440x900 (the native screen resolution being 2x that at 2880x1800). The crispness is worth the lack of real estate. Sharpness is definitely worth having.

TurningCanadian• 7 years ago

Definitely works fine on Linux too

Larrikin• 7 years ago

You won't be blown away when you start using a 4k monitor, but you will hate every monitor that is smaller after you start using a 4k

DeathRay2K• 7 years ago

Yes it's worth it. I'm usually on Windows, and can say that 95%+ of the programs I use work flawlessly on a 24" 4K monitor with 175% scaling. The crispness of a text editor on a 4K screen is worth every bit of the 5% of programs that have scaling issues. And these days, remaining scaling issues involve some parts of the app scaling correctly, and other parts (usually menus) not scaling correctly. I never encounter "blurry" programs with bilinear scaling anymore.

bootlooped2• 7 years ago

I have an ultrawide, so about 60% of the pixels of a 4k. Best feature IMO is being able to have 2 windows open side by side without feeling squished. I assume it is even better with a full 4k.

chrisseaton• 7 years ago

Is the scaled image that much sharper

Sharpness is a property of the pixel density, which is separate to the number of pixels (the 4K part), so it's not really a question which makes sense.

For example I have a 4K screen for coding but it isn't particularly high DPI because it's physically large at 68 cm so nothing on it is 'scaled' beyond normal.

coldtea• 7 years ago

Most people buy monitors from a fixed set of sizes (say 23-27 inches) so within that range 4K means pixel density with not much variation.

And of course, for the same monitor size, compared to 1080p, it would be ~2x the density, so that's a valid fixed comparison to make too.

In other words, read the parent's question as: "if it worth it to go 4K over 1080p/2K for the same monitor size? Is it noticeably sharper?".

tracker17• 7 years ago

I'm not really using scaling... at home, I'm using a single 40" 4k display... absolutely love it. It's like 4x 20" 1080p displays, without lines in the middle... on OSX with moom, it's been pretty awesome (I pin my launcher on the left so when I run a windows vm, the taskbar is at the bottom).

It's definitely been worth it for me... I wish my work would let me bring my own... I'd rather the one 40" than the two 22" (1080p) that I have now.

nerpderp822• 7 years ago

Thanks for https://manytricks.com/moom/

newprint• 7 years ago

Recently bought 32" Samsung 4K display ($360). At first, I thought it a waste of $$$. But as soon as I fired-up Visual Studio, I realized how wrong I was. I'm planning to get a second one very soon.

krferriter2• 7 years ago

I got a 4K 15.6" laptop last year and it is totally worth it. I can't go back to 1080 now, text is very noticeably blurry and jagged. Text and UI lines on 4K with properly implemented scaling are so clean. I'm using KDE Plasma on X11 with 1.8x scaling and it is perfect.

atoko• 7 years ago

It's not the sharpness but the incredible amount of real estate you have. I can have documentation, a preview window and the code open at the same time in what would be their full screen resolution.

To anyone considering one, make sure it supports 60hz at full resolution, otherwise the choppyness makes it unusable.

Timucin3• 7 years ago

From my experience, scaling problems are usually related with the app itself rather than the screen or the OS but;

After getting used to the retina display of macs, you realise how bad, how pixelated 1080p looks on texts. Especially the workplace monitors since they are usually the cheapest ones. Upgrading 4K gives you joy after being exposed to those cheap screens. :)

noir_lord• 7 years ago

Yes.

I use a LG 27UD69P-W 27" 4K at home and 27"@4K is the sweetspot for me.

The dpi is high enough that fonts are crystal sharp without any noticeable hinting artifacts as I've gotten older poorer screens give me a literal headache.

jki275• 7 years ago

Absolutely.

I don't have any scaling issues, the added screen real estate is a life saver.

bunderbunder3• 7 years ago

I've had two 4K displays.

One was a 15" laptop screen. It gave me no end of trouble. Anything that didn't scale properly would be unusably small due to the downright excessive pixel density, and a distressing number of apps didn't scale properly. Most everything else about that computer was great, but I ended up replacing it within a few months, mostly due to dissatisfaction with the display.

The other is a large external monitor. I can't remember how big - maybe 27"? I like it quite a bit. Combined with a tiling window manager, it's a bit like having a multi-monitor setup, only with even more flexibility in how to arrange your workspace.

So, I guess, my advice would be to ignore the marketing terminology and just make sure that your monitor has an appropriate pixel density - not too little, not too much.

seba_dos1• 7 years ago

I'm using 13" 3200x1800 display with KDE Plasma, won't ever go back.

overgard2• 7 years ago

I find it a lot easier to read, personally. Less eye strain. Most of the windows apps I use, at this point, finally support it (a few stragglers). The only downside I've found is that cabling can be complicated (not every HDMI cable is 4k enabled), and if you're a gamer, it's a lot easier to get a 144hz refresh rate on an older 1080p screen. (Which is also one of those things you probably don't realize is really nice until you actually use it)

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 7 years ago

Java is great for server apps where you care more about throughput. But on the desktop where latency matters, I have yet to use a non-trivial Java application that didn't have latency issues.

diebir2• 7 years ago

IntelliJ is a good example, it does not have latency.

markdog123• 7 years ago

Chronic issue for me. Consistently waiting on WebStorm lag to complete my typing/commands. May be the vim or other plugins I use, not sure. This is on 2 powerful machines. One Mac, one Windows.

Timucin3• 7 years ago

I guess I must say this first: I am not working at JetBrains, not defending or advertising their products in any way. Just sharing my own experience and opinions.

I've been using a few products* of JetBrains on MacOS for the last 3 years, either with 1 or 2 1080p monitors or with an additional 4K monitor but unlike the rest, I haven't had much problems.

There were times the IDEs were consuming too much CPU and were super sluggish as described but then, somewhere in their forums, I found that they have suggested to use the Java suite they have provided with the IDE itself instead the default one and that solved my problem once and for all.

On the other hand, a colleague of mine had suffered a lot from the very same products because of slow disk speed. This is not the case for other ~50 engineers I am working with though and all of them are using new Macbook Pros and JetBrains IDEs.

So I guess it is safe to say that they are usually working OK on modern day computers.

* PhpStorm, WebStorm, GoLand, IntelliJ

pharaohgeek• 7 years ago

I'm with you. I have 2x28" 4k monitors attached to my MacBook Pro and have had zero performance issues in IntelliJ, AppCode, or DataGrip.

diebir2• 7 years ago

Running IntelliJ on a Macbook with Dell U2718Q every day and right now. Usually 2-3-4 large projects open. No issues.

abalone• 7 years ago

While I am an IntelliJ IDEA fan, this is one area where Eclipse stands out. Long ago they decided to part ways with pure Java and incorporate native platform UI via JNI.[1]

[1] https://www.eclipse.org/swt/

bootlooped2• 7 years ago

I had a professor that was adamant Java IDEs are not written in Java. I pointed out IntelliJ was written in Java, but he countered that it used native code under the hood to do the UI. I never investigated this claim any further, and don't have a strong feeling as to whether it is true or not.

lokedhs• 7 years ago

It's not. IDEA is fully Java. Eclipse, however uses SWT as its graphics system, which uses native code.

nottorp2• 7 years ago

Well, if you go through the 2 year course on using Eclipse, you mean. Snappiness doesn't help much if you simply can't figure out how to create a new project from the ide menus...

overgard2• 7 years ago

Probably isn't helping that their screenshots are all about a decade out of date

krferriter2• 7 years ago

It's slow on Linux with a 4K display too, I don't know if I'd go as far as "unusable". I don't know what toolkit they're using or what's slowing it down but it's a really slow UI. It looks nice though.

kevinherron• 7 years ago

Hmm. Not slow for me.

EngineerBetter• 7 years ago

Using Goland and we have no performance problems.

21• 7 years ago

Fortunately Electron apps don't have this problem, since their UI is GPU accelerated.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 7 years ago

Can’t tell if joking or not...

__m• 7 years ago

ruuning rider on an iMac Pro with 5120x2880 display, with no problems so far

dsabanin• 7 years ago

I run IntelliJ and WebStorm on i7 iMac 4k with additional 4k monitor and have no issues.

I think for me key is RAM size, I set the heap size to 4GB because I work with big projects and it helps a lot.

teilo• 7 years ago

I run dual LG 4K on a 2018 MPB 15, and am in PyCharm and Datagrip all day. I am not seeing these issues.

3 years later, IntelliJ is still unusably slow on macOS with a 4K display

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