Is IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate slower than the Community edition?

Question

The ultimate has many more features, so I imagine it loads slower, consumes more memory and is generally less responsive. Actually I don't care about the load time all that much, but memory and responsiveness (which are related) are of more importance.

Did you notice any difference between these editions?

Answer 1

If you are working on the same project and using the same features, you should not notice any differences.

However, if your project uses several languages (like Ruby, Python, Groovy, Scala), load time will be longer since IDEA will have to load plug-ins for these languages.

Also, more features used in the project, means that IDEA will need more memory. If you don't hit your hardware limit and have a descent rig, you'll not notice it at all. If you are short on memory, IDEA may become slower because of the frequent garbage collections and operating system swapping.

So, generally it would require more memory since you are going to use more features, but if it doesn't swap and you have enough free RAM, you will not have performance problems. Also note that you can disable all the unused plug-ins to save resources.