Archive for February 2012
For the longest time I couldn’t get into the IntelliJ IDE for software development, however last year I tried out PyCharm and loved it. One of the key things for me when dealing with an IDE is their VIM support and JetBrains has one of the better implementations of VIM I’ve used in an IDE. Recently I noticed the performance of PyCharm had fallen off to the point where it was becoming unusable. Little things like moving up and down in the editor window sometimes had 0.5 – 1 second lag times which is totally unacceptable. My laptop is an old Dell D830 with a Core2Duo 2.0 GHz with 4GB of memory so it is getting a bit dated but still… I was almost ready to head back to the Ecilpse platform in order to save my sanity when I thought I’d try one more time to find an answer to my performance woes.
There are lots of tricks out and about that provide advice on performance improvements, most are common sense… don’t use network drives for files, have enough RAM, blah, blah, blah. I knew none of these were my issue. Finally, however, I saw something that caught my eye, something about the JVM having performance issues with Intel’s graphic card EXA acceleration method which my laptop uses. The fix was the simple addition of the following to the pycharm.vmoptions file.
-Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false
I’ll be the first to admit that this trick didn’t make PyCharm a screamer however it is certainly usable again and hopefully I can squeeze a few more months out of my old Dell 
