I used to be in the category of “Zend Studio runs sweet, what are you all complaining about?” but after upgrading to Zend Studio 5.5 I sadly found myself in the “I just want to code, why are you running so slow!?” category.
Here’s how I managed to speed things up
1. Give it more RAM
On the Mac goto Applications/Zend/ZendStudio-x.x.x/bin/ and right click on ZDE, choose “Show Package Contents”
Open up Contents folder and open Info.plist with your favourite editor
Find…
<key>VMOptions</key>
… and change the contents of the line below it to something like this …
<string>-Xms128m -Xmx256m</string>
This tells Java to allocate a minimum of 128mb ram and a maximum of 256mb, your mileage may very, I have 1GB of ram on my machine and find these settings to work just fine.
2. Tone down the Code completion
By default my Zend Studio had set Code Complete pop-up to appear after 0ms, this is kind of taxing on the CPU so nudge it up to 100ms or so, and do the same with the Call Tips, set that to a good 200-300ms
3. Don’t use the OS Look and Feel
I’ve found that sometimes this will help, and sometimes I just can’t see a difference in performance. But if you’re really stuck with a slow installation of Zend Studio then try unchecking the “Use OS Look and Feel” option under the main Preferences window
4. Clear the Cache
If you are still seeing Zend Studio running slow then try clearing the cache, this is a serious time saver especially if you have large cache files sitting around (40mb+)
On the Mac delete everything under …
/Users/ant/ZDE/config_x.x/caches/
(Of course replacing ant with your username) also note that for older versions the cache directory may be stored elsewhere, but its never hard to find.
Conclusion
Zend Studio is a great IDE for PHP, but now and again it can handle like a pregnant yak, so you might want to bookmark this page for when that happens.
I was quite desperate, since Zend Studio was crashing all the time and used 99% CPU when scrolling
Now scrolling a lot still takes about 25% of my CPU, but everyting works smooth now.
Thanks very much for these tips!
Jeroen
Thanks for the tips!
Although the increase in performance is not enough to make me keep using this. Upgraded from 6.0 to 6.1 ….. nothing happened and I got the feeling this is going to stay like this for a while.
It still keeps crashing on me every 10 minutes or so, with the message of not having enough memory to work with.
“Well, I’m sorry if 4 gigs is not enough mr. ZendStudio!”
It is most likely the setup of my computer, cause I see enough people being happy/content with the program. Too bad, the features we’re all good, but no good to me if I can’t use them.
Zend Studio became so slow that was unusable, your tips seem to have worked, thanks a lot for sharing these!!!
It works on my ZS 5.1! No more over 100% cpu usage.
Thank very much.
Thanks for this post. It was a big time saver for me. I cleared the cache, it worked very smoothly.
Hey guys,
I’ve been a Zend Studio user for many years and I’ve been unable to live without the great features it has.. I’ve never been able to move to another ide for so many reasons, nothing could give me the features that were now an essential part of my coding, but I have to say..
I couldn’t cope with the slow speed of Zend Studio anymore, how much memory it eats, the slow start up times, the slow shut down times, the crashes and the general buggy application it’s become, it was slowing down my development times and making me frustrated..
I’m now using the latest version of Netbeans and it has all of the features I love about Zend Studio and more.. give it a try and give it a chance to prove itself to you, at first you might not think it’s got everything you need but it’s all there and more.. trust me
Just some friendly advice from somebody in the same position as you guys, great article by the way and it did speed up Zend Studio for me after tweaking it.. but it’s still slow and it eats loads of my memory.. netbeans on the other hand uses about 25% of the memory zend studio does.. it loads quickly, shuts down quickly and I don’t get frustrated when I’m coding.. I’ll never look back, happy coding
Let’s hope Zend Studio 9 proves to be a little faster, I haven’t installed the beta yet, don’t have the stomach for it if something goes wrong.
The cloud feature looks like fun though.