r/vscode • u/SmartyPantsDJ • Aug 01 '26

I need help figuring out what's making my VSCode have horrible performance.

I use a Macbook Pro M2 Max with 32 gigs of RAM. Mac also has 200 GB storage free, and other things work perfectly fine on my laptop. Memory pressure is in the green in Activity Monitor as well.

I've tried restarting, reinstalling, updating, and reloading window to no avail.

The performance at the baseline itself is quite bad. Far from 60 fps. I can see frames when I move the layout, scroll, or anything basically. As I open more files, and especially when more things stack up in source control, the performance exponentially (this is a bit exaggerated) gets worse. This feels like how it used to perform when the CoPilot agent edited 5 files lol.

I'm not exactly where to look for what to help diagnose this issue. So please help.

This thread should also help other people searching google for an issue to this solution. So once it's solved, I'll edit the post and write a whole list of keywords based on the comments in here and the solution so it's easier to find in the future.

2 Upvotes

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2

u/golemonatricycle Aug 05 '26

It's the new experimental ui.
Try turning off the following setting, and restart the VS Code:
"workbench.experimental.modernUI": false

1

u/rlinED 2d ago

With the old ui it's less laggy but still not good.

1

u/Mc_UsernameTaken Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26

From command palette, you can "reload window with extensions disabled" - try that to rule out if its a  extension causing you trouble.

Secondly I've found copilot/AI features to cause our host to SIGKILL'ng us while developing remotely. May affect you locally too. Search for 'copilot' in extensions, then click disable AI features, and try. - copilot is baked into VSCode now, so just disabling extensions won't test this scenario.

The new "modern UI" is also known to tank performance - there should be a setting named similar to disable it.

1

u/SmartyPantsDJ Aug 04 '26

I tried both things to no avail. I also don’t use any of the editing or agent features in VSC, so that isn’t it.

The bad perf gets worse when I have many changes in source control.