Performance diagnostics for IntelliJ Platform

This is a plugin for IntelliJ-based IDEs that gives real-time insight into the performance of the IDE itself. The plugin is under active development and should be considered experimental. This is not an officially supported Google product.

So far the plugin has the ability to trace methods on demand and get call counts and timing measurements in real time as the IDE is being used. Since the tracer is tightly integrated with IntelliJ, it can easily do things like "trace all extensions that implement the PsiElementFinder extension point". Click here to see what that looks like. The overhead of the tracer is low, so high-traffic methods like HashMap.get() and ProgressManager.checkCanceled() can be traced without issue.

Getting started

To run a development instance of IntelliJ with this plugin installed, run

./gradlew runIde

Then open the tracer via Help -> Diagnostic Tools -> Tracer. In the window that pops up you can try typing in a command like this:

trace com.intellij.openapi.progress.ProgressManager#checkCanceled

Or this:

trace psi-finders

The tracer view should show call counts and overhead measurements in real time as you use the IDE.

Commands list

• trace com.package.Class#method - Trace the specified method.
• trace psi-finders - Trace all overrides of PsiElementFinder.findClass().
• trace tracer - Trace important methods in the tracer itself.
• clear - Zero out current statistics.
• reset - Remove current statistics.
• untrace * - Remove tracing from all methods.

Installing

To use the plugin in a production IDE, run ./gradlew assemble and look for a zip file in the build/distributions directory. You can install the plugin from that zip file via the Install Plugin from Disk action in IntelliJ. In order for the bytecode instrumentation agent to load correctly, you will need to do at least one of the following:

• Add -Djdk.attach.allowAttachSelf=true to your VM options. This is already done by default in recent versions of IntelliJ, but you should make sure you don't have custom VM options overriding the defaults.

• Alternatively, add a VM option of the form -javaagent:/path/to/this-plugin/agent.jar to attach the instrumentation agent at startup.

Contributing

To make changes, open this project in IntelliJ and import it as a Gradle project. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting a pull request.