I am using Zend Studio 5.5 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard on a Macbook Pro 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Intel X25-M SSD 8GB RAM with constantly 5-6GB RAM free and CPU at 10-20%. I manually installed Java 5 to make it work.
Zend Studio 5.5 runs very fast except when it the file has more than 1,000+ lines. Scrolling becomes slow and typing becomes slow.
I have already followed the steps here: http://www.antbrown.com/web-development/speed-up-zend-studio/ and it hasn’t helped.
I am not upgrading to the later Zend Studio versions since I tried them before, and they are super super crap and slow, they are afterall hacks of Eclipse.
I do run NetBeans, however, while typing is ok (still a bit slow), scrolling is a pain (I use a Magic Mouse which has the touch scroll, when I scroll, its always laggy, other mouses suffer the same issue)… scrolling only works on both Zend and NetBeans when I manually grab the scroll-bar and drag, which is not exactly very user friendly.
Are there ways to fix this? Or are all Java based IDEs doomed to suffer from lag on large files? (Even though 1,000 lines of code in one file isn’t big at all).
Besides from fixing, I wouldn’t mind to change to any other script editor, I only really need Syntax highlighting / code completion / basic syntax error highlighting (don’t need any of the running debug stuff) for PHP/JavaScript/HTML/CSS, stripping tailing whitespace on save and tabs into spaces. I never use any of those extras like database connections, FTP, SVN etc etc… I use dedicated apps to do all those… So really, just need a slim, small super fast script editor for Mac OS X NOT BASED ON JAVA! Java apps seems to always lag. Of course please don’t be silly and suggest notepad or terminal, too many smart asses suggest it, if your going to be a smart ass, don’t respond.
NetBeans should definitely be fast enough for you, given your hardware. Which version are you using? Performance improvements are a big focus of the NetBeans 7.0 release stabilization, so it would help us a lot if you try out the latest daily builds from http://bits.netbeans.org/netbeans/trunk/nightly/ and give us feedback via the PHP users mailing list or the bug tracker, which you will find on the NetBeans website.
The reason why Java IDEs are slower than Notepad is not because they are written in Java, it is because the editor is very powerful. All the FTP, SVN, database etc. features are not really performance and memory intensive, but a sophisticated editor that introspects your code to give you precise code completion support is always quite performance intensive (especially if you have a large codebase), regardless of the language you use to implement it. But we are trying really hard to improve this for NetBeans 7.0.