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Reducing VSCode Memory Consumption

Claudio Davi on June 19, 2019

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 i...

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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

Brian,Kun Liu • Nov 22 '24

watchExlude setting is working

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.

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!

Mohannadk28 • May 18 '22

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

Jakub Sarnowski • Jun 21 '19

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

Mudassir Adili • Jun 19 '19

Thank you for this. This memory consumption issue has been a pain for me

Claudio Davi • Jun 21 '19

It is a pain to us all. Glad I could help!

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!