I started using Julia almost one year ago. I use VSCode (1.75.1) with Julia Language Support (v1.38.2), on Windows 10 Pro.
I must use Julia 1.6.5 (working on a massive project with a large team). In the beginning, everything was fine: the language is terrific and the IDE is excellent: I can run my scripts with “Execute active file in REPL”, I can type commands on the console and also select snippets and execute them by hitting ctrl-ret.
In the last few months Julia REPL started to slow down and now is barely usable. Very often the Julia Language Server hangs, for no understandable reason: ctrl-return does not work anymore (in fact it works, but I have to wait 50-80 seconds for any kind of reaction). Sometimes also the “Execute active file in REPL” command seems disabled. In that case, I quit Visual Studio, waiting for the Julia process to stop and then I start again: I have to wait for the slow startup of the Julia Language Server, but then everything seems to work again for a while. Unfortunately after 10-15 minutes, the problem comes back.
I’ve tried to change the environment, installing only the package I need. This improved the situation for a few days, but after a week the problem started again.
A small update.
When the Visual Studio Code Julia REPL hangs, we check the task manager and notice that two Julia processes are running. One of them consumes a lot of CPU. So if we kill that process, the REPL awakes suddenly and for a while everything is fine. Unfortunately, after a few minutes, the problem appears again.
What is that process doing? How do we disable that activity?
Any comment would be appreciated.
I haven’t used the Language Server yet, but it certainly sounds like the culprit.
My understanding is that it’s not the most mature piece of the Julia ecosystem, so it may be struggling with larger projects. More recent versions of Julia have improvements to threading that help with interactive tasks, so that might help when you can upgrade in the future.
I’d suggest disabling the Language Server for now, at least until you can confirm whether it’s the problem. And then maybe open an issue with the developers to see if anything can be done.