Claudio Davi

Posted on Jun 19, 2019

Reducing VSCode Memory Consumption

#beginners #webdev #productivity #tutorial

How to reduce VSCode memory usage

I've been using VSCode for quite a while now and one of the most annoying things that I have noticed is how much memory it uses, specially in comparison with Sublime Text.

I will present you a few tips that I have found to at least make it usable for big projects.

Disclaimer: I mostly use Python, therefore I'm sure that you will find a lot more options to optimize for Javascript or your preferred language.

Most of the tips below must be placed into your user settings (JSON)

Telemetry

First, did you know that VSCode sends data to Microsoft about it's usage?
If you want to turn it off is quite simple, place

"telemetry.enableTelemetry": false

into your configurations and you are all set.

Search Indexing

Search is one of the most memory consuming activity VSCode does. It has to keep an index of all your files and their contents. You probably don't want to search inside your node_modules/ or env/ folder right?
I have had this problem before and I don't know if they come disabled by default now, but it is on my config file so here it goes:

"search.exclude": {
    "**/node_modules": true,
    "**/bower_components": true,
    "**/env": true,
    "**/venv": true
  }

File Watcher

The file watcher is used to detect changes in your working files and folders.
If you are like me and every new package you have to pip | npm install it on the fly you probably have a lot of changes in your secondary files and folders.
So we are going to disable the watcher for those folders and whatever else we don't want to follow, like our git/objects folder.

 "files.watcherExclude": {
    "**/.git/objects/**": true,
    "**/.git/subtree-cache/**": true,
    "**/node_modules/**": true,
    "**/env/**": true,
    "**/venv/**": true,
    "env-*": true
  },

Organizing your Explorer

Ok, now we have optimized for performance, now we want to optimize for productivity. One of the most important things to do is to reduce the clutter in your workspace.

To do that we are going to remove files from the Explorer tab. Why? We don't really want to see files that we are not going to work with.

"files.exclude": {
    "**/.git": true,
    "**/.DS_Store": true,
    "**/.vscode": true,
    "**/__pycache__": true,
    "**/.pytest_cache": true,
    "**/node_modules": true,
    "venv": true,
    "*.sublime-*": true,
    "env*": true
  }

That will leave you with most of the clutter out of sight. Which is Great!

Extra Tips

A few extra tips to help you:

Workspaces

Workspaces are great, create several of them. I always have a few instances of VSCode open for the same project, if you are doing Full-Stack use one for back-end and another for front-end development. If you, like me, are building microservices you can use one workspace for each service. You are going to see how clean it all becomes.

Extensions

Keep the minimum amount of extensions that you can possibly have, most of them are not optimized. Keep what you use daily and disable or uninstall the others. I go through my extensions once a month and do a Marie-Kondo-style cleanup.

Full Script

"files.exclude": {
    "**/.git": true,
    "**/.DS_Store": true,
    "**/.vscode": true,
    "**/__pycache__": true,
    "**/.pytest_cache": true,
    "**/node_modules": true,
    "node_modules": true,
    "venv": true,
    "*.sublime-*": true,
    "env*": true
  },
 "search.exclude": {
    "**/node_modules": true,
    "**/bower_components": true,
    "**/env": true,
    "**/venv": true
  },
"files.watcherExclude": {
    "**/.git/objects/**": true,
    "**/.git/subtree-cache/**": true,
    "**/node_modules/**": true,
    "**/env/**": true,
    "**/venv/**": true,
    "env-*": true
  },

Do you have any more tips that can improve VSCode performance? Share with us!

Top comments (24)

João Moreno • Jun 21 '19

Hey there. VS Code dev here. A few comments:

Disabling telemetry does absolutely nothing to reduce memory.
There is no search indexing at all. We use ripgrep to provide fast search. Adding stuff to search.exclude reduces no memory at all.
Creating workspaces is actually allocating more memory than simply opening folders.

The best thing you can do to reduce memory consumption in VS Code is: install less extensions.

Claudio Davi • Jun 21 '19

Hi, thanks for the heads-up, about the telemetry i know it does not affect memory consumption, but I mentioned I could include as a tip for other devs that don't like sharing data.
Great thing that search doesn't index I didn't know that! But removing folders for search greatly improves user experience during search.
For workspaces, I'll give it a go then. Thank you for the tip!!

Edward Koetsjarjan • Aug 6 '19

is it possible to see what extensions uses how much memory, the easy way?
was looking but not found any , thank you

Renan Moura • Feb 20 '21

kkkkkkkkkkkkkkk i dont think so man ... we also write some shit code sometimes ... kkkkk dont be so silly kkkk

Arthur Fiorette • Aug 30 '21

Mano, rir com kkk fora do brasil é errado demais ausdhauishdiashd

Oren Mizrahi • Jun 21 '19

if everyone removed their telemetry - vscode would be less effective. it helps the VSC team counter issues with the product. i think.

Mohannadk28 • May 18 '22

if someone got an issue he will probably just report it in the GitHub issues page

Claudio Davi • Jun 21 '19

Yeah, I do believe so. But most devs I know are quite savvy about sharing data, so I included this just to warn people that it does share and there's a way to disable it!

Jakub Sarnowski • Jun 21 '19

My tip would be: delete all useless or redundant extensions that you're not actually using 😄

Harsh Shandilya • Jun 20 '19

Just implemented this on my laptop and memory consumption has gotten so much better! Even things like searching are significantly faster now. Thanks a lot for sharing!