Performance Tuning of IntelliJ IDEA startup options

IntelliJ IDEA is my favorite IDE for my day-to-day work.

I do moonlight with Eclipse as well from time-to-time, but the sheer speed and power of IntelliJ pulls me back to IDEA every time.

I have found the following tuning parameters to be very useful for fast loading, caching, etc for IDE to function smoothly:

	-server
	-Xms2048m
	-Xmx2048m
	-XX:NewSize=512m
	-XX:MaxNewSize=512m
	-XX:PermSize=512m
	-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
	-XX:+UseParNewGC
	-XX:ParallelGCThreads=4
	-XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=1
	-XX:SurvivorRatio=8
	-XX:+UseCodeCacheFlushing
	-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
	-XX:+AggressiveOpts
	-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
	-XX:+CMSIncrementalMode
	-XX:+CMSIncrementalPacing
	-XX:+CMSParallelRemarkEnabled
	-XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=65
	-XX:+CMSScavengeBeforeRemark
	-XX:+UseCMSInitiatingOccupancyOnly
	-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=64m
	-XX:-TraceClassUnloading
	-ea
	-Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false

view raw IntelliJ_IDEA__Perf_Tuning.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

If you are using Windows 64-bit, please add the above config in idea64.exe.vmoptions file and if its 32-bit, please add these tuning parms to idea.exe.vmoptions present in <<IDEA_INSTALLED_LOCATION>>/bin folder.

Also, just in case if you are not aware, on a 64 bit machine, if you want to launch IntelliJ IDEA in 64 bit mode, you need to launch idea64.exe and not idea.exe. For this, ensure you have IDEA_JDK and IDEA_JDK_64 environment variables pointing to your 64 bit Java Installation folder.

Finally, the above IDEA Tuning parameters can also be used for an IntelliJ IDEA installed on a Linux machine as well.

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.