Startup time in VSCode extraordinarily long

Hi,

I wanted to share an issue that I keep encountering upon starting Julia in VSCode, hoping that I might not be the only one affected by it.

Whenever I start VSCode, open a *.jl file and try to run a line of code, it takes a somewhat surprisingly long period of time for VSCode to execute, or even acknowledge the command. No “circular arrow” symbol appears at the end of the line, and nothing gets executed for a long time. That is, usually minutes but up to half an hour.

There is no indication of progress whatsoever, no signs that a package is loading, or that a computation is undervway. However, Julia does appear to be running, as a subprocess of VSCode, constantly consuming about 30 % of CPU time.

Curiously enough, the command eventually does execute. So my usual workflow is to fire up VSCode, ‘execute’ some lines, then do some other work, and after half an hour when I come back to the IDE I proceeed to work normally.

This only happens with the first command after starting VSCode. Any subsequent commands run just fine.

I’m using VSCode v1.70.2 on Win64 with the Julia Language Support package v1.7.6. My Julia version is 1.8.0.

Does anyone else have this experience? What would be the proper forum to report this to?

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That must be very unusual! I suspect a virus of something in your Windows, unless you’re really low on RAM, to low to support VS Code well, or the line you run very unusual (what is it?).

Julia 1.8.0 is rather new, and hopefully someone already tested with VS Code… I haven’t used VS Code in a while now and will test on my Linux. You could try the older 1.7.3 to compare or newer 1.9-DEV. It seems you’re on latest version of everything, I doubt needed but you could also check as a last recourse 1.71 insider version. It might also be intriguing to check Linux version in WSL2.

It doesn’t seem to be any of these. I’ve got plenty of RAM, and this was taking place already with Julia 1.7. The expression does not matter either. I usually run something like “3+3” to try things out first.

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These kinds of issues are usually caused by antivirus software AFAIK.

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Thank you for the GitHub link. I found an issue that describes the same problem: Slow Response from Extension when working in a folder · Issue #2788 · julia-vscode/julia-vscode · GitHub.

It looks like I managed to reduce the waiting time to “first result” to about 90 sec by paring down my workspace to only ‘essential’ directories (that contain actual code and not other data).