IDE Painfully Slow On Mac

Development Tools IDE 2.x
1

I recently started working with the Arduino IDE and have noticed that the IDE uses a lot of energy, heats my Mac, and has slowdowns. I understand any Electron app will be extremely unoptimized but this seems to be worse than any other Electron app I use.

I mostly use VSCode and have anywhere between 10 and 20 extensions running at a given time. In a given day my 12hr power will be about 500-700 units. Yesterday, I used the IDE for 3 hours straight (two windows open, consistent serial data coming in) and my 12hr power jumped to about 1000.

I have experienced general slowdowns where the scrolling becomes choppy to outright crashes. It appears the biggest cause of the slowdowns is the serial monitor.

Has anyone else experienced these slowdowns before? Is there other data I can give to paint a better picture?

Arduino Version
Version: 2.3.2
Date: 2024-02-20T09:53:59.281Z
CLI Version: 0.35.3
Copyright © 2024 Arduino SA

Mac Version
MacBook Pro 14-inch, 2023
Apple M2 Pro 16GB

2

I am running IDE 2.3,2 on an M2 MacBook Air w/16GB/Sonoma 14.4.1 and while I haven't noticed excessive energy usage it does creep along compared to IDE 1.8. Depending on the board installed and any particular protocol stacks used, compilation can take a long time and I usually use the time for a short task like a drink of water, etc.

I haven't experienced any choppy scrolling or crashes though.

3

Hi @CONTR0L.

This could be caused by specific unusual types of usage of Serial Monitor:

Does the problem still occur while you perform this experiment?:

  1. Upload the following simple sketch to your Arduino board:
    void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
  Serial.println("hello");
  delay(1000);
}
  2. Open Serial Monitor.
  3. Select "9600" from the baud rate menu.
  4. Close any other Arduino IDE windows that are open.
4

Hey @ptillisch

There aren't any slowdowns when running that code. Even when removing the delay.

The slowdowns appear to only happen after running the IDE for at least 45 minutes.

I wonder if there is some resource connected to the serial console that gradually eats up memory and doesn't free it, either intentionally or not.

One thing to note is when the IDE slows down and gets to a point where I have to force quit it, no other applications on my computer are affected.

Hope this helps.

5

Does it occur if you run Arduino IDE for at least 45 minutes while the connected board is running the simple test sketch I provided?

6

@CONTR0L

I am using MacBook 2014-2015
When I updated to 2.x.x, the IDE almost became unusable and would never finish updates/downloads/loading of things… i couldn’t even type of letter of code without my computer fan running full speed and cpu overheating… :man_shrugging:t2:

I think there may be a known open issue and a fix coming down the line??

Not sure if this will help you but it helped me tremendously. I limit and only allow the IDE access to half of my cpu cores…

7

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