rust-analyzer: Rust-analyzer VSCode plugin stuck while fetching

Rust-analyzer stopped working for me a few days ago. I think it was after upgrading to the latest plugin version. Rust-analyzer shows: “Fetching” with a spinner indefinitely. Sometimes I have gotten it to show “Fetching: metadata”.

I can replicate this in an empty project just after running cargo init mytestproject.

I have tried these steps:

• Downgrading to the previous version of the plugin: this first failed because it would never download the binary, it would just show something like “binary for XXX is not downloaded”, but clicking the button did nothing. I downloaded the binary for that version manually and pointed the config to use it and that worked, but it gets stuck in the same way.
• I’ve deleted ~/.cargo/registry and ~/.cargo/git.
• I’ve made sure rust is up-to-date: rustup update.
• I have removed all my rust-analyzer specific settings from vscode.
• I’ve checked the rust-analyzer logs. They don’t seem to show anything weird. The latest messages for the various logs are:

[DEBUG lsp_server::msg] > {"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"$/progress","params":{"token":"rustAnalyzer/Fetching","value":{"kind":"begin","title":"Fetching"}}}
[DEBUG lsp_server::msg] < {"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":null}
[INFO rust_analyzer::main_loop] handle_event(Response(Response { id: RequestId(I32(1)), result: None, error: None }))

[Trace - 11:52:16 AM] Received request 'window/workDoneProgress/create - (1)'.
Params: {
    "token": "rustAnalyzer/Fetching"
}


[Trace - 11:52:16 AM] Sending response 'window/workDoneProgress/create - (1)'. Processing request took 0ms
No result returned.


[Trace - 11:52:16 AM] Received notification '$/progress'.
Params: {
    "token": "rustAnalyzer/Fetching",
    "value": {
        "kind": "begin",
        "title": "Fetching"
    }
}

INFO [6/23/2021, 11:52:16 AM]: PersistentState: {
  lastCheck: undefined,
  nightlyReleaseId: undefined,
  serverVersion: undefined
}
INFO [6/23/2021, 11:52:16 AM]: Using server binary at /home/arong/Downloads/rust-analyzer-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

• I have tried to run the analysis-stats command, and it seems to work ok (except for some performance counters):

Failed to create perf counter: Operation not permitted (os error 1)
Database loaded:     552.02ms
Failed to create perf counter: Operation not permitted (os error 1)
  crates: 1, mods: 1, decls: 1, fns: 1
Item Collection:     1.26s
Failed to create perf counter: Operation not permitted (os error 1)
  exprs: 10, ??ty: 0 (0%), ?ty: 0 (0%), !ty: 0
Inference:           625.89ms
Total:               1.89s

I’m lost as to how to debug this further. Any suggestions about where to look would be helpful.