How to investigate VS Code taking 30% of CPU although it is supposed to do nothing

Question

My CPU is oscillating between 20 and 30% usage for CPU usage based on Windows Task manager. it is occurring for several hours now. I expect this VS Code instance to do nothing.

How can I investigate what is going wrong?

I tried to open "Developer: Toggle Developer Tools", then go to performance tab and record. Unfortunately it is reporting that most of the time is in "idle" (which is what I would expect)

(I also tried to ask on Twitter without success https://twitter.com/apupier/status/1100348567926071296)

regards,

Answer 1

Based on the comments it seems that what the Task Manager reports is the total use of VS both on CPU utilization and memory.

A broad range of reasons could explain the observations you made.

1.Increased CPU and Memory usage by VS Studio.
 
 2. Increased Fan Speed.
 
 3. Your code being idle.

It can be the case that the VS Code or one of its plugins is actually doing something even if you do not actively use it. For sure if it is opened, even without being used the program will use some memory.

You can find more information on the CPU usage per VS Code Extension by typing: code --status in the command line. You can also try to execute: code --disable-extensions to run VS Code without any extensions to see if the CPU/Memory usage is reduced.

Results of the code --status will look like this

There are some related issues you could also see in GitHub, I checked before writing this answer:

• 100% core CPU usage without apparent reason
• Excess CPU usage
• Excess CPU usage editing C file