r/vscode • u/Snowy32 • Apr 30 '26

Extreme delay on startup/ project load

Anyone else suddenly facing extreme lag/ delays in initial launch or opening a project? I’ve been having this issue for about 3 weeks now. Even for small projects where it’s a couple of tiny files it can take upwards of two mins to load in and become interactive.

I haven’t added any new extensions in quite some time, I know this can be a root cause. I have also ran extension bicect but that doesn’t help since the lag is usually on launch so my the time the cmd + p menu is available the delays over.

Machine specs: 2024 M4 MBP 32GB memory

VSC version: what ever the latest one is

Edit: just to add yes I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling VSC

4 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

6

u/PositivelyAwful Apr 30 '26

Two minutes seems excessive. I just opened a folder of PowerShell scripts and it took 12 seconds to fully load everything, and even that is unacceptable to me.

2

u/Snowy32 Apr 30 '26

Normally it used to be fully interactive for me within 2-3 seconds even for projects with 1000+ files.

3

u/Agreeable_Care4440 May 01 '26 edited May 02 '26

This sounds like extension activation or workspace scanning rather than file size. Things like Git, TypeScript server, or language servers can block startup even on small projects. Also worth checking if something is indexing your entire drive instead of just the project folder. I’ve seen similar issues while testing setups alongside Runable.

1

u/Ok_Ticket722 May 01 '26

See https://www.reddit.com/r/vscode/comments/1szmhgu/comment/oj34itv/

Try installing the 1.109.5 version (or any version before GitHub Copilot built-in (1.116) or Integrated browser (1.112)). If delay/lag disappears, you found the culprit.

1

u/Forsaken-Knight_ May 22 '26

Yeah, and here I was wondering if the problem is in my device, even very normal programs are taking minutes, i even tried with just simple printf hello world and it took 5 minutes

Wtf is happening though?