vscode: Very slow start with snap package

Issue Type: Performance Issue

Since upgrade to Ubuntu 18.10 - perhaps related - vscode takes over a minute to start up , maxing out CPU and sending load average soaring. Once system recovers vscode seems normal. However attempting to open a file from command line with command code <filename> returns immediately but takes similar amount of time - up to a minute - before file appears in the editor, though not with same high CPU symptom.

An strace -p to the code process while it’s starting up shows lots of lseek/reads (I’m not sure how to interpret that info to be more helpful) - I presume it’s reading through some massive amount of files/data or something?

VS Code version: Code 1.28.2 (7f3ce96ff4729c91352ae6def877e59c561f4850, 2018-10-17T00:20:56.183Z) OS version: Linux x64 4.15.0-36-generic

System Info

Item	Value
CPUs	Intel® Core™ i5 CPU M 520 @ 2.40GHz (4 x 1197)
GPU Status	2d_canvas: unavailable_software checker_imaging: disabled_off flash_3d: unavailable_software flash_stage3d: unavailable_software flash_stage3d_baseline: unavailable_software gpu_compositing: unavailable_software multiple_raster_threads: enabled_on native_gpu_memory_buffers: disabled_software rasterization: unavailable_software video_decode: unavailable_software video_encode: unavailable_software webgl: enabled_readback webgl2: unavailable_off
Load (avg)	2, 2, 2
Memory (System)	7.72GB (0.39GB free)
Process Argv	–disable-extensions
Screen Reader	no
VM	0%

Process Info

CPU %	Mem MB	   PID	Process
    2	   166	 31313	code main
    0	    40	 31315	   zygote
    0	   119	 31499	     shared-process
   27	   308	 32303	     window (Welcome - mp (Workspace) - Visual Studio Code)
    2	   158	 32326	       extensionHost
    0	     8	 32331	       /bin/bash
    0	    63	 32333	       watcherService
    2	   103	 32509	     window (Issue Reporter)
    0	     0	 32626	   /bin/sh -c /bin/ps -ax -o pid=,ppid=,pcpu=,pmem=,command=
    0	     0	 32627	     /bin/ps -ax -o pid=,ppid=,pcpu=,pmem=,command=

Workspace Info

|  Window (Welcome - mp (Workspace) - Visual Studio Code)
|    Folder (gtfe): more than 34258 files
|      File types: png(6182) jpg(4463) py(4080) js(3310) pyc(3056) sql(1670)
|                  pdf(1546) htm(1340) html(1045) ini(481)
|      Conf files: package.json(43) grunt.js(24) gulp.js(7) makefile(6)
|                  launch.json(1) settings.json(1) tslint.json(1)
|      Launch Configs: python(5)
|    Folder (mp): 5300 files
|      File types: py(1689) pyc(1681) h(184) txt(111) so(74) whl(23) exe(20)
|                  rst(18) json(17) conf(12)
|      Conf files: settings.json(1);

Extensions disabled

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 6 years ago
Reactions: 3
Comments: 20 (11 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

I’ve confirmed with the Snap team that this is an issue on their part. It is related to loading fonts.

On 18.04, initial startup is very slow, since loading all the fonts is slow. But fonts actually get cached to ~/.cache/fontconfig. So, successive launches use that cache.
On 18.10, font information seems to be RAM only. So, launching is always slow.

The team will address this soon, as far as I was informed.

joaomoreno on Nov 6, 2018

We fixed this in snapd 2.36.2 which was released last week 😃

flexiondotorg on Dec 20, 2018

@Tyriar @joaomoreno This can be closed.

flexiondotorg on Jan 11, 2019

I believe this has been recently fixed. Start time has turned almost instant.

scruti on Dec 13, 2018