Debugger is incredibly slow to start up

[fresheneesz]

I'm working on a relatively large project in a vagrant virtual machine. Without the debugger, my servers take about 5 seconds to start up (start listening). With the debugger, this process bloats up to 2 minutes or so. The speed once its up is slower, but not nearly 20 times slower.

Its maddening to have to wait 2 minutes between debug cycles. When it takes 30 seconds to find and fix a change, the 2 minute wait is where most of my time goes. Is there any way to speed this up?

[askhogan]

Wow. I thought this was just me. I spent an hour today going through each require. I found mongoose was incredibly slow. I couldnt pin it down and eventually gave up an switched back to .10

I am using webstorm, but no fancy settings. It makes writing code so difficult.

[hankduan]

I saw something similar this week. Do you think it could be related to this? #9319

[misterdjules]

@joyent/node-coreteam Adding this to the 0.12.2 with priority P-1 as it affects a lot of users of the remote debugger. See also nodejs/node#877.

[unbornchikken]

I have made some progress in investigation, please take a look at my comments there:

nodejs/node#877 (comment)
nodejs/node#877 (comment)

[pixelprodev]

0.12.2 released today and the issue still exists.. any word on this?

[misterdjules]

@ThePixelPro Yes, we made the decision to release v0.12.2 to make other important bug fixes available now. The issues that are still open in the 0.12.2 milestone will be moved to the 0.12.3 milestone, and this one specifically will be one of the top priorities for that milestone.

[pixelprodev]

Thanks for the update. I know I'm not the only one who's looking forward to this fix. Keep up the good work all.

[misterdjules]

@ThePixelPro Thank you for the support, it is very much appreciated 👍

[misterdjules]

@fresheneesz @askhogan @ThePixelPro @unbornchikken I haven't been able to reproduce the issue, do you have some detailed instructions with how I could reproduce that reliably? Does it happen with latest node v0.10 too?

Also, as @hankduan suggested, I have a hunch that it might be related to #17203. Would you mind building node with that change and let us know if it fixes your issue? That PR is specific to node v0.10, so if the problem is not present in node v0.10, that won't help. In that case let me know and I can provide you with a change that applies to node v0.12.

Thank you!

[unbornchikken]

Hello,

Please read through this thread carefully: nodejs/node#877

There you can find syntomps, logs, profiling data, repro cases, investigation results from the community, anything that required to identify and fix this isssue. I don't think that this is related to timers. This is realted to processing new JS files: nodejs/node#877 (comment)

I didn't tried node 0.10.37+. Has anyone result from this? If not, I'll try it later.

[tzaitsev]

I thought the goal was to get this into 0.12.3 re: "and this one specifically will be one of the top priorities for that milestone."

[pixelprodev]

@tzaitsev see the iojs link from @unbornchikken. (nodejs/node#877) toward the bottom they talk about a registry change made in webstorm that solves this issue. I'm not sure if this is a node core issue, but rather if this is simply something webstorm is doing to handle tooling with sourcemaps.

Personally, adding the change suggested has made starting the debugger almost instantaneous. I have not looked into it any further than that because it satisfied my particular need. Your mileage may vary.

[tzaitsev]

@ThePixelPro confirmed faster if you edit the registry on WebStorm and disable js.debugger.v8.use.any.breakpoint

Good call!

[alexander-tsig]

Where can I edit or disable on WebStorm of Mac?
js.debugger.v8.use.any.breakpoint

[wespen]

I haven7t found that in Mac registry anywhere

[alexander-tsig]

So, isn't there any way to speed up loading of node debug on Mac's WebStorm?

[davidje]

Is it back? I still get this issue in 4.2.1 -- how can I confirm its the same exact issue? It only happens with Hapi or Mongo. Its double worse when I require both. When I commenting out Mongo and Hapi, it speeds it up. What are the steps to verify that I have the same issue? thanks

[o0x2a]

I'm using latest version of webstorm 11.0.1 and node v5.0, and debugging node.js code is terribly slow. Vote up for a fix 👍

[Pat-rice]

@Code-guru I have node v5.1 and Webstorm 11.0.1 - Also incredibly slow.

[o0x2a]

@Pat-rice use node-inspector instead, it's awesome. You may need to have Xcode/Visual Studio installed if you are mac or windows since it needs to compile some stuff when you install it. If you are on Ubuntu/Debian sudo apt-get install build-essentials may do the trick.

[HowlingEverett]

@Code-guru No luck, I'm afraid. This is a NodeJS 5.x issue, not a Webstorm issue. I am seeing similar delays (30+ seconds to attach to a debugging session) using the latest node-inspector with NodeJS 5.1.

[atom0s]

WebStorm v11.0.3 with Node.js v5.4.1, launching any of my projects in debug mode takes upwards to a minute for it to finally start. This issue is still definitely around.

Edit: This workaround does seem to fix the delay, but as others mentioned it has issues with debugging certain things then:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/31055505/1080150

[amcsi]

I'm getting this issue too.

/usr/bin/node --debug-brk=33810 --nolazy --harmony dist/server.js
Debugger listening on port 33810
Example app listening at http://:::8080

It takes 12 seconds to get from the second output row to the third.

[indutny]

@amcsi this is quite expected, I guess. Why are you using nolazy?

[amcsi]

@indutny WebStorm is adding that bit. The same Debug run that adds --debug-brk with a random number.
I'm happy to accept tips on how to disable the lolazy bit (couldn't figure that out yet), although I heard that I need that to properly debug async.

[develar]

@indutny V8 in lazy mode cannot debug column-based (e.g. lambdas) correctly — https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2825
And, as you maybe remember, disabling lazy mode doesn't help — nodejs/node#877 (comment)

[XavierGeerinck]

Still having this issue too

[itai-codefresh]

also me

[wpoch]

I'm also having this issue with /Users/wp/.nvm/versions/node/v5.7.0/bin/node --debug-brk=52887 --nolazy --debug

[anyong]

How is this issue still open after a year? Can never debug my apps properly as they take so long to start up... it's faster to just write a bunch of console.log's and restart the normal server. =/

[ChALkeR]

@anyong It's not open, it's closed.

See nodejs/node#877 and nodejs/node#3875 (especially this one).

[emascarinas]

try adding:
--no-preload --hidden='node_modules'

[amcsi]

@emascarinas

"C:\f\PhpStorm 2016.1\bin\runnerw.exe" C:\p\nodejs\node.exe --debug-brk=50033 --harmony --no-preload --hidden=node_modules hot.js
C:\p\nodejs\node.exe: bad option: --no-preload
C:\p\nodejs\node.exe: bad option: --hidden=node_modules

Those don't appear to be valid node parameters

[develar]

@amcsi Nodejs 5 is slow for you, not 4, right? Fix (https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-19117) will be available in the next PS update (2016.2).

[amcsi]

nodejs 5 yea

oh itll be fixed in the next IntelliJ version, cool!

[rorgonas]

@emascarinas Thanks for your solution. It worked well.
Here is the complete e.g.
node-inspector --web-port 1337 --no-preload --hidden='node_modules'

[amcsi]

What is this node-inspector, and how is it going to connect to WebStorm?

[shaunwarman]

Start up seems fine in version 2016.1, but now I can't see any breakpoint data. I just see Collecting data... forever.

[develar]

@shaunwarman Node JS 6 supported, but IDEA with this fix is not yet released.

[shaunwarman]

Thanks @develar so I just need to drop node version to 5?

[develar]

@shaunwarman Yes. EAP release will be in a few days.

[shaunwarman]

Edit: After webstorm update everything works great with the debugger in node v6 👍