Its a drawback, yes. But not a deal breaker for most people. Most professional users have good RAM and SSD, and start IntelliJ maybe once a day. It's "Good Enough ™"
I have 64gb of ram and Webstorm still freezes for 15+ seconds sometimes. It's not GC, it's not memory, not plugins, just random bugs or filesystem access blocking UI updates etc.
I wrote plugins for most IDEs including JetBrains. If you hold the EDT they block your plugin. There's no way a core plugin allows that. I'm guessing this is some other bug, did you file an issue with your logs?
I read through the logs and they didn't show anything very helpful. Every time I ran profiling tools on it, it never occurred so I haven't created a ticket yet ... :)
That’s just the jetbrains releasing an old runtime (11) with an even older GC and relatively low max heap size. Just simply bumping the heap size up helps, but changing it to G1GC with a lower target pause time and adequate heap size will make it so much smoother. But if you can then change to a newer runtime and use ZGC which has basically no pause whatsoever.
The unfortunate effect of it being a JVM product is that you need to tune GC and memory setting because defaults are made for people having 8GB of RAM.
