WebStorm lags when I type

Question

I am running the 64 bit version of WebStorm 2016.1.1, and it lags every few characters that I type. I've tried disabling plugins and increasing the max allocated memory to 8GB, but the performance hasn't improved.

It doesn't lag for a fresh new project so it must be my project size. However, I have not typed up that much code (< 5k lines), so I've concluded it must be all my node_modules.

I've marked my build directory and node_modules directory as excluded, but for some reason only the build directory appears in red (which is the color of an excluded directory). The node_modules appears in my list of excluded directories when I check my settings, but it still appears yellow in the project list:

The only other thing I can think of that seems suspicious is that it says "library root" next to node_modules, but I haven't been able to find much info on that.

I am completely out of ideas. What on earth could the problem be that's causing the editor to lag so bad?

Answer 1

node_modules directory is set up as a JavaScript Library. Libraries can't be excluded from indexing, thus excluding node_modules does nothing. Please remove it from libraries (Preferences (Settings)/Languages & Frameworks/JavaScript/Libraries, select '<project name> node_modules' there, press Remove, OK). Then make sure that node_modules is shown as excluded.

Further investigations revealed problems updating VCS checklists. It is fixed in WebStorm 2016.2 EAP