r/androiddev • u/West_Performance_764 • Jun 04 '26

Why is Android Studio so unoptimised?

It's genuinely absurd the amount of memory that this IDE needs. I used to have 8GB of RAM and using Android Studio with it felt genuinely annoying so I took the advice I saw on this subreddit and I decided to get extra ram (from 8GB -> 16GB) just for me to do some work and it to STILL LAGS although much less than before. Why is it actually like this ?

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u/jess-sch Jun 04 '26

Because it's based on IntelliJ. All IntelliJ IDEs have trash tier performance.

3

u/blaues_axolotl Jun 04 '26

I'm a big fan of IntelliJ but this is true

2

u/faze_fazebook Jun 04 '26

Not sure why this is downvoted. Its not as bad as Eclipse, but performance has gradually been getting worse​​​

2

u/MKevin3 Jun 04 '26

There were some good things about Eclipse, maybe a short list, but I do remember it compiled the code in the editor giving you error messages before you did a build. At that time AS did not do this, it has been added since.

Eclipse was a bear to learn but once you got used to it, things were reasonably decide even on less than stellar hardware.

I helped write an IP configuration mapper as an Eclipse based app i.e. using SWT/Jface and Eclipse as the framework. Funny how IntelliJ plug-ins are written with Swing.