Tips for Handling large projects with Maven and IntelliJ IDEA

Question

I was reading this blog post about the experience of a team using Intellij Idea for large maven projects and have also looked at a similar question posted a

Answer 1

As suggested by @CrazyCoder, I followed the steps on the official FAQ regarding this matter:

Common solutions for IntellJ IDEA performance problems

Specifically, the following seemed to have had an appreciable affect:

1. Moved the c:/Users/$user/.IntelliJIdea12 to a location excluded by McAfee's on-access-scanner, and updated $INTELLJ_INSTALL_FOLDER/bin/idea.properties to point to the new location like so (where c:/dev is the folder excluded by McAfee):

   idea.config.path=c:/dev/.IntelliJIdea12/config
   idea.system.path=c:/dev/.IntelliJIdea12/system
   idea.plugins.path=c:/dev/.IntelliJIdea12/config/plugins
   idea.log.path=c:/dev/.IntelliJIdea12/system/log
   

2. In $INTELLJ_INSTALL_FOLDER/bin/idea.properties set idea.jars.nocopy=true as documented in this blog post.

3. Reverted back to the stock $INTELLIJ_INSTALL_FOLDER/bin/idea64.exe.vmoptions. The only changes that remains are those suggested in Too low heap size for a 64-bit JVM. Here is what I have in the that file currently:

   -Xms1200m
   -Xmx1200m
   -XX:+UseCompressedOops
   -XX:MaxPermSize=350m
   -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=96m
   -XX:+UseCodeCacheFlushing
   -ea
   -Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false
   -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
   

4. Disabled Git integration plugin since I mostly use command line Cygwin-Git.

5. It was useful to monitor .IntelliJIdea12/idea.log. For example : I disabled the osmorc (for OSGI) plugin after seeing that it was frequently logging error while trying to opening zip files in the projects. Sample error :

   WARN - pi.vfs.impl.jar.JarHandlerBase - error in opening zip file: C:\dev\a-maven-project\pom.xml java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file at java.util.zip.ZipFile.open(Native Method)
   at java.util.zip.ZipFile.(ZipFile.java:127)
   at java.util.zip.ZipFile.(ZipFile.java:143)

6. Disabled all the plugins that I do not need. The current list of disabled plugins is :

   Disabled plugins: ASP (0.1), Android Designer, Android Support (10.0), Atlassian Connector for IntelliJ IDE (3.0.9, SVN:1212171008), Base Cucumber (1.0), BashSupport (1.1beta16), CFML Support (3.53), CheckStyle-IDEA (4.2), ClearCase Integration (2.0), Cloud Foundry integration (1.0), CloudBees integration (1.0), Commander (1.0.0), Copy as HTML (0.8.1), Cucumber for Groovy (1.0), Cucumber for Java (1.0), Database Navigator (3.0.2501), Describe Key (0.3), Drools Support (1.0), Eclipse Integration (3.0), Flash/Flex Support (1.0), GWT Support (1.0), Geronimo Integration (1.0), Git Integration (8.1), GitHub, Google App Engine Integration (1.1.4), Grep Console (1.1), GuiceyIDEA (8.0), HAML, IDEtalk (1.0), IdeaVim (0.28), Identifier Highlighter (3.62), IntelliJad Plus (0.5.6), JBoss Integration (1.0), JBoss jBPM (2.0.0), JRebel Plugin (2.0.2), JavaFX (1.0), Key promoter (1.0.11), Log4JPlugin (1.02), Markdown (0.8.3), Osmorc (1.4.3), Perforce Integration (2.0), PluginUpdateNotifier (2.0.3), RemoteTail (0.3.4), Resin Integration (8.1), Ruby (5.4.0.20130410), SQL Query Plugin (2.2), SSH Remote Run (0.1), Seam Pageflow Support (1.0), Seam Pages Support (1.0), Seam Support (1.0), SmarterEditor (0.8.3), Struts Navigator Plugin (1.3.4), Subversion Integration (1.1), TFS Integration (999.999), Tapestry support (1.0), TestNG-J (8.0), UI Designer, UI Designer (Core), Vaadin Support (1.0), Visual SourceSafe Integration (2.0), WebLogic Integration (1.0), WebSphere Integration (1.0), ZKM-Unscramble (1.0), dmServer Support (0.9.5), hg4idea (10.0), soapUI Plugin (3.5)