I’ve been facing an issue in Vscode for a long time where when I’ve printed a lot of data to the terminal, everything gets really unresponsive – Scrolling through the results is like I’m drunk it’s so unresponsive, and I’ve tried a bunch of stuff to fix it.

Here’s the Benchee benchmarks for a function in Elixir that happens to print a lot of data to the terminal, if I run it in Vscode:

A meagre 12.4 IPS on that function, but not only that but I see the CPU usage spike and the computer becomes unsuable.

But if I run in Ubuntu’s default terminal (GNOME Terminal):

5 fold increase and I don’t even see CPU spike above 30%.

So what gives?

Here’s what I’ve tried:

• Disable hardware acceleration
• Change scrollback limits in VScode
• Changed scrollback limits in the terminal
• Removed all extensions
• Defaulted config

Same thing.

Still stuck, I was kinda hoping this would be a “here’s how I fixed it” post. But it’s not. Sorry hopeful people with the same issue, I’ll update this if I ever get to the bottom of it…