I have a few large (~600k lines of code) Delphi projects. They include some custom components which our team has developed.
Often, when I call up code completion with ctrl+space or just by pressing “.”, the IDE locks up and thinks really hard for a long time. Sometimes the delay can be a full minute, or more. Other times, it pops up immediately with suggestions.
What factors influence the performance of intellisense in Delphi? Is there any way I can improve this performance?
My best solution so far is to turn off the automatic completion, and use ctrl+space when I need to meditate quietly for a minute or so.
I can’t help but mention that VS2005, VS2008, and XCode all seem to give virtually instant intellisense feedback (although I’ve never tried it on a project this large).
As an alternative, I’ve offered this suggestion.
Be sure to explicitly include all the units(*) used by your project in the dpr.
Do not rely on the search path to find a unit called from another unit, add it to the dpr. The dpr will be much longer but all the compilation related things will be faster, including code-insight.
(*) not the units of the installed components.