You can easily accumulate quite a number of them. There is a vast number of plugins available for IntelliJ IDEA. Excluding your project from your antivirus's activity may increase your performance quite a bit.
Each of these actions may be first intercepted and verified by your antivirus software. idea directory, your sources, runs javac compiler and such. IntelliJ frequently accesses files in its temporary. Note that you can also exclude folders directly from the Project Tree's context menu - Mark Directory As → Excluded.Īntivirus activity can result in a significant performance hit. You can also exclude files by a pattern for the current module in the bottom part of the window - Exclude files. In the Sources tab, you can mark individual directories as Excluded. Go to File → Project Structure → Modules. If you need more fine-grained control over exclusion, you can do that also on Project level. Note that some of the common candidates for exclusion are already presented - such as internal directories for Version Control Systems. You can add ignored files/folders by pattern in Settings → Editor → File Types → Ignore Files and Folders You can define ignored files either for all projects or on per project basis. An example can be - automatically generated files, minified CSS/JS, compiled files, documentation, logs and more. There are, however some files and file types, which can be safely ignored by IDEA across all the modules. Unloading of modules works well when you can unload the whole module. You can learn more about this feature in this blog post by JetBrains. IntelliJ IDEA is smart enough to warn you that if you are loading a previously unloaded module, you may also want to load its depending modules. In the dialog, you can see all the modules in the current project and you can assign them to either Loaded Modules or Unloaded Modules category.
To enter Unload modules dialog, right-click a file or module in your Project View and select Load/Unload Modules. Once you need an unloaded module again, you can load it, so it is available to IDEA. This can greatly improve IDEA's performance. Version 2017.2 introduced a new feature called Unload Modules, which allows you to define which modules of the project should be excluded. In such cases, it would be really helpful to exclude some modules from IDEA's activity completely. Or maybe the app contains a lot of legacy modules, which are hardly ever touched.
Maybe you are developing just frontend/backend part of the application. Maybe you are responsible for just one independent module. However, it is often not necessary to work with all the modules at the same time. IDEA needs to process a huge amount of files when searching, refactoring or inspecting the code. Working on a large project with many modules can greatly reduce the IDE performance. Running IntelliJ IDEA IDE can be taxing on your machine, especially for large projects, here are a few tips, which can help you to achieve better performance.