Arduino IDE 2 is incredibly slow on Mac M2

Development Tools IDE 2.x
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Hello,

Huge fan of Arduino. The new IDE seems incredibly slow. It is very slow to load from scratch - 30 seconds and over, and also super slow to open an existing file. I can select a file from "Open Recent" and it will take over 30 seconds for just the window to open, and then it pulsates the logo for a minutes before opening the file. And these are very simple sketches - one or two libraries included and one simple file

The other problem is it constantly forget which board was previously selected. I have to reselect it every single time

So far the only thing improved over the original class IDE is having monitor and plotter up at the same time. Everything else seems either slower or more confusing

I have a MacBook Air M2.

thx

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Hi @jotk.

Currently, Arduino IDE 2.x is built for x86-64 host architecture only. These builds work on the ARM-based Mac machines thanks to Rosetta 2, but this does result in some performance impact.

The need to produce native Apple silicon (M1, M2 processors) is being tracked here:

The good news is that the IDE developers have now enabled the IDE to be built on the Mac ARM hosts:

Unfortunately, some additional work must still be done before Arduino is able to start distributing official builds for M2, but this is very good progress towards that.

If you are interested in a more advanced endeavor, it is possible for you to build the latest development version of Arduino IDE 2.x on your M2 machine to produce your own native build. Instructions are available here:

https://github.com/arduino/arduino-ide/blob/main/docs/development.md#development-guide

There are a couple of known bugs that resemble what you describe. If you can provide me with detailed instructions I can follow to reproduce the problem, I can determine whether it is one of those, and if not submit a formal report to the developers.

1 Like
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Thank you so much for the detailed reply. I am looking forward to the Mx native version, but that does not explain the current slowness of the IDE 2. I have various other apps that run under Rosetta and none are even close to be as slow as this.

I have a NRF52 Feather by Adafruit, as well as some other boards. I set the board and the port. I open a new window, it forgets which board and port is set. It also just seems I am setting the board and port information far more than I had to with IDE 1.

Thank you for this information but for now I will return to just using IDE 1.

Oh, another feature I was excited about seems completely broken. The autocomplete doesnt seem to work at all. Many months ago I downloaded a beta and it seemed to work then, but at least in the current released version I have now nothing autocompletes ever. Now it might be because the app is slow with anything I don't wait long enough for autocomplete to pop up, but at that point it has no value

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( my reply I typed out disappeared )

Thank you for the detailed response

If I select the board, say the Feather NRF52, and the port, the next time I open a window or the file it forgets this information

I should also mention the other benefit of IDE 2 is the auto complete seems completely broken. Months ago I tried the IDE 2 beta and it seemed to work then, but in the release version I have there is no autocomplete

Given the extreme slowness (none of my other rosetta apps are close to being this slow), the lack of auto complete, and the bugs, unfortunately at this time it makes more sense to just use IDE 1, or sadly Platform IO in VS Code.

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I agree that the results you describe seem exceptional.

Are you using an antivirus? These are often found to be the cause of performance problems.

How do you do that? Are you using the File > New menu item to open the new window?

Please try this and let me know what results you get:

  1. Select File > New from the Arduino IDE menus.
  2. Select Tools > Board > Adafruit nRF52 > Adafruit Feather nRF52832 from the Arduino IDE menus.
  3. If you see "indexing" or "Building sketch**" at the left side of the status bar at the bottom of the Arduino IDE window, wait until the process finishes and it disappears.
  4. On a new line in the sketch, type: pinM
  5. Press the Command+Space keyboard shortcut ("Trigger Suggest").

The expected result is that the "Suggest" menu (AKA "autocomplete"/"Intellisense") will appear:

image
image474×404 32.6 KB

That is a good hypothesis, but I still think it is worth trying the quick experiment I proposed above just to see whether you get different results than I do.

100% agree. For me, the primary use case for autocomplete is as a faster alternative to typing. I am frequently frustrated by the slowness or unreliability of autocomplete features in general (not specific to Arduino IDE).

I apologize for the inconvenience.

The forum's automated spam filter sometimes produces false positives, which result in those topics temporarily being hidden unjustly, as happened to yours. This is why a team of human moderators review every action taken by the automated system.

So I think in the end these false detections are always corrected, but there is an unfortunate delay between the time of the spam detection and when a moderator reviews the action.

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Interesting. I restarted and that seemed to fix a lot of the issues. Wonder if the app has a memory leak. While it it still slow, it is not unbearably slow.

Autocomplete now kinda works, which is exciting, makes me want to stick with IDE 2. One weird thing is it constantly fails to work, but if I write the same line above most other code lines autocomplete starts working again. I then cut and paste the line where it should be.

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I wonder if there is something in the code that breaks the language server processing?

Would you mind providing a sketch that has this problem and providing instructions (e.g., specific text to attempt to autocomplete, and a line number at which I should add it) to reproduce the problem.

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