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The title pretty much says it all. I am on an older laptop with 2 cores, and even browsing the internet while IntelliJ Idea is running is agony. Surely there are some settings I can tweak to fix this.

Using the latest version.

Thanks in advance.

Zach Boyd
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    *Surely there are some settings I can tweak to fix this. Using the latest version.* Of course. You can install an older version of IntelliJ (from an era when your computer would not be considered ludicrously underpowered). Or, buy a new computer. – Elliott Frisch Oct 29 '18 at 18:45
  • Get another IDE? – Joakim Danielson Oct 29 '18 at 19:20
  • For development, I would suggest having an SSD and at least 16 GB of memory without which you are going to waste a lot of your time waiting for builds etc. – Peter Lawrey Oct 29 '18 at 19:36
  • Yea, I agree it would be nice. For now, I am stuck with the hardware I have... – Zach Boyd Oct 29 '18 at 19:37
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    That said, I have run Intellij on an ARM with 4 GB of memory and it was slow but ok to use. – Peter Lawrey Oct 29 '18 at 19:37
  • I have the same amount of memory, and it has been fine inside the app, but when I want to use other apps at the same time, it gets tough. – Zach Boyd Oct 29 '18 at 20:04

2 Answers2

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You can do a few things about this, the one with the most notable effect is called "Power Save Mode", which does a lot of things to the IDE that will decrease it's usefulness, but will also make it use less resources.

You can also disable any plugins you don't need, and try to decrease the memory available to the IDE as low as you can without crashing it.

See this question as well

Zachary Craig
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  • So far this seems like a substantial improvement. I will have to see how much I miss some of the things it turned off. – Zach Boyd Oct 29 '18 at 19:36
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Disable as much of the plugins as possible. Disable the ones that you are very unlikely to use.

J. Wilson
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    So far this seems like a substantial improvement. I will have to see how much I miss some of the things it turned off. – Zach Boyd Oct 29 '18 at 19:36