Everything becomes slow in VS Code when Copilot is enabled

[from-nibly]

So recently whenever I turn on Copilot, everything in my vscode starts slowing down. Intelligent never resolves, linting errors take forever, and basically all features outside of opening files and typing in them directly take a really long time to resolve.

Interestingly enough it doesn't even seem to help if I disable it for just typescript. It only get's fixed if I disable the extension itself.

Is anyone else having this issue?

is there a good way to peek into what's going on?

[ultmaster]

Same issue here starting around days ago. My suspicion is that some recent updates have broken things. Haven't figured it out really. I had to disable the extension temporarily.

[alexvoedi]

Same problem in small python project.

[vdods]

Same problem in Rust and Python projects. Even saving a file can take up to 7 seconds to complete. It makes the CPU chug very hard for a surprisingly long time even for a couple edits here and there. I can reliably fix this by disabling the copilot extension, and it reliably reoccurs when re-enabling the copilot extension.

[Oba-One]

Same issue and sketches me out a little ngl

[dan-cooke]

Was working just fine for weeks, and now all of a sudden on a new Remix project it is slowing to a halt. I'm wondering if its parsing node_modules or something by mistake.

[asif17r]

I have the same issue here with C++

[Dredok]

same here, also with C++ project (on ubuntu and using latest vscode, if that matters).
disabling the extension everything works as smoothly as before ...

[dougdyson]

Copilot has been really frustrating the developer experience the past couple of days - going to explore alternatives, as there are other options now.

[ZupoLlask]

I'm noticing the following pattern while working with Jupyter notebooks: when things get slow, Copilot status icon is spinning.

Maybe some API is taking too much to return some answer or some API background service is crashing...

[codinginflow]

I'm noticing the following pattern while working with Jupyter notebooks: when things get slow, Copilot status icon is spinning.

Same problem here and I noticed the same behavior.

[Recodify]

Same here. It's so slow that I've had to disable it. Come guys, this is a paid service and it's currently, for all practical purposes, broken

[lebifeng]

Check your activity monitor then maybe you will find out that some process is running with full cpu usage.

[vdods]

FYI, I switched to VSCode Insiders edition and this is no longer a problem. Copilot works and doesn't slow anything down.

[ZupoLlask]

Hi @vdods,

So how's your feedback 3 weeks switching to Insider's? Do you still consider the issue as fixed from your experience?

[vdods]

Yeah, it still works well.

[ZupoLlask]

Version 1.80.*, right?

[codinginflow]

I use Insiders and I still get the hang regularly.

[vdods]

Yes, 1.80.* works for me.

[AbdullahWins]

As copilot constantly goes through your code to make sense out of it, it is expected that it'll slow your computer down a bit as it's constantly running on background while you're using vscode.

You can minimize the workload by removing unused background tasks or maybe upgrade the computer if needed.

[codinginflow]

As copilot constantly goes through your code to make sense out of it, it is expected that it'll slow your computer down a bit as it's constantly running on background while you're using vscode.

You can minimize the workload by removing unused background tasks or maybe upgrade the computer if needed.

I have a high-end PC and it still becomes crippling slow. It can be mitigated by reloading VS Code so there must be some underlying bug.

[AbdullahWins]

Yeah that's another possibility, maybe it's triggering multiple instances which is slowing the vscode down.
It's safe to say maybe they broke something in this update

[codinginflow]

I have the same problem. I found that I can improve the speed again by executing "Developer: Reload Window" in VS Code. Then once it becomes slow again, I repeat it.

Obviously not a great longterm solution but I'm sure this will be fixed eventually.

[biggrizzleyguy]

Any fix for this yet? Autopilot causing my Visual Studio 2023 run slow on my high end machine.

[asif17r]

For me, the problem fixed up to 95% when I disabled "C/C++" extension. Now I only have "code runner" and "github copilot" extension. You guys can try this fix if it works.

[Hupdy]

Nice

[abdul-alhasany]

I have the same issue. While working on a PHP linting extension I noticed that formatting the document is taking a very long time.

When debugging the issue I noticed that workspace.onDidChangeTextDocument is being triggered constantly without stop. This occurs even when no text is being changed.

You can reproduce the issue by creating an empty extension and add console.log or use output channel log inside the event.

[adhal007]

I had this one extension called linter which was causing this issue - was able to narrow down to this and disable it for better performance.

[nurgazik]

I get that copilot might be going through the codebase and analyzing the code, thus it's responses might be slow, but my entire VS Code is slow. When I am typing something into the chat window the rendering of characters lag for an entire second or so, making it almost unusable. I don't have the most powerful PC in the world, but it's still a macbook pro core i7 16GB ram. Does anyone experience the same?

[jaakko-paavola]

My VSCode was close to unusable with Copilot still a couple weeks ago. I did some searching and tweaking and now it is significantly better. Two things that I believe made all the difference:

1. I stopped working with a folder open, i.e., with a workspace, only opening individual files (and keeping as few of them open as possible).
2. I keep disabling Copilot with a key shortcut when I don't need it, because the worst lags coincide with the little Copilot icon in the bottom right corner spinning as Copilot is fetching an inline suggestion. The key shortcut required a little hack using the Toggle extension, because the shortcut "enable/disable Copilot completions" does not seem to work. If people could go upvote my bug report about this would be good to get it some visibility.

[JeBehen]

My IntelliJ has become very slow since Copilot was introduced. All of my apps are slow now.

[packley1]

My IntelliJ has become very slow too (since Copilot). Noticed too that my (Windows) laptop is much slower as well. Have there been any solutions for this?

[grindstm]

Working in Jupyter notebooks is becoming impossible. Most of the time, there are full seconds of delay between typing and characters appearing on the screen, particularly in markdown cells. The keyboard shortcut for disabling copilot completions isn't working as expected. I have tried the insiders release of vs code and the pre-release of copilot to no avail. This problem has only recently gotten insanely bad. Pylance and copilot also seem to be fighting each other.

[samraul]

Agreed. Sometimes starting to run a notebook cell takes an entire minute, even though the cell itself takes less than a second to run.

[chrisoffner3d]

I have the same problem. I'm running VS Code 1.87.0 on an M3 Max MacBook Pro, and using Jupyter Notebooks with Python kernels while having the GitHub Copilot extension on makes everything very slow and laggy.

[Jeffresh]

Same problem here, and it's strange because it doesn't happen until you run a bunch of cells and stay in them for a while. If you close the project and reopen it, vscode runs fine until you spend some time working.

It is like a memory bug or something. It doesn't happen when working with flat Python code.

[JasonGross]

It happens when working with Jupyer view on flat Python code, see https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/121204

[JeBehen]

Same problem in a small JavaFX project. I thought my IntelliJ was acting up. I opened jGrasp and a dialog box opened and said jGrasp opened to slowly and suggested I up grade my video driver.

[JasonGross]

I've reported a more specific issue at https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/121204, where "Run cell" in Jupyter view of .py files in VSCode takes many seconds before actually running the code.

[bnrosa]

Same issue here sometimes it take seconds to save a file, and I'm using a really potent PC (12th gen Intel Core i7, 64GB of RAM, etc). It would be great if we could at least disable the copilot actions that run on file save.

[RexBarker]

I was having the same issue. For large projects, it seems copilot is too ambitious with the analysis. You can try reducing the scope of the search by changing the file settings (settings.json (USER)):

[lucasscurtoo]

Hey, i did that and doesn't worked, the thing with the issue is i can't use ctrl + space ( don't know the name sorry) i have to reload vs code and if i open the chat it starts the problem

[Aloxion]

Hey, i did that and doesn't worked, the thing with the issue is i can't use ctrl + space ( don't know the name sorry) i have to reload vs code and if i open the chat it starts the problem

This is the same problem i have, it starts slowing vscode down, when opening the chat (loading it)

[emok032]

Same issue. Seems like Intellisense is not as responsive anymore. Can't get any Intellisense feedback or suggestions or it's extremely slow like it's waiting for Copilot to finish something (even though it's not doing anything at the moment).

[JeBehen]

Go to your settings and disable Copilot.

[Aloxion]

Have same issue on Linux Ubuntu 22.04 ... having copilot activated slows my whole vscode

[Aloxion]

For people that have a large chat, try and create a new one by pressing the + button in vscode:

I have a suspicion, that maybe copilot can't handle a chat that's too big, or that it generates something that takes a long time to analyze.

This "fix", worked for me

[evgeniiarts]

My VS Code is unusable for typescript when enabling Copilot.
I have a typescript project and type checks do not work properly with enabled Copilot. A type check can take several minutes to show an error, if at all.
While the same type checks work flawlessly and instantly when Copilot is either disabled.

I have disabled all extensions for testing this, and can confirm that Copilot alone can mess up your workflow badly.