Severe performance issues on local host (the computer running the code-serve PWA)

[diraneyya]

Hello!

I am very grateful to this project, as it has completely transformed the way I develop. Today, I run my development directly on the VM where the code is deployed. It is simply fantastic.

However, the more dependant I became on Code Server, the more I needed it to perform reliably. This has been a sore point lately.

As you can see below, Chrome's task manager shows a CPU utilisation of 300 percent on my MacBook Pro (with an M2 chip):

The issue also seems to be accompanied by this message:

The good news is that the VM is healthy and have plenty of resources. So the issue is on the machine using the code server as a PWA (a progressive web app):

I would appreciate any hints on how to troubleshoot this issue, it has been killing my productivity in the last few days.

[diraneyya]

To be completely transparent I do something non-standard which I do not think would in any way cause this issue but I am stating it here anyway. I just hate your icon! And it does not help me reorient myself around my deployed servers so one thing I have been doing is replacing the icon in Mac OS X:

To ensure the icon is not overwritten when the PWA is updated I added this to my .bashrc (seems like a really bad practice, I know!):

# Overwrite code-server's icon with my own
cp ~/.icons/code-server.icns ~/Applications/Chrome\ Apps.localized/pgvector.app/Contents/Resources/app.icns

The replacing icon is just a Sepia-color-adjusted copy of the standard VS Code icon.

[code-asher]

Some other folks have reported resource issues with the client as well, but I am not sure what causes it. You might have better luck asking the VS Code folks upstream, we just wrap the web version of VS Code and do a bit of patching so we are not nearly as knowledgeable as they are.

If you can, reproducing with VS Code web directly (run code serve-web using native VS Code) could help identify if the issue is VS Code core or if the problem is only in code-server due to one of our patches or something.

Either way, to debug probably some browser profiling will be required. Do you have a specific way to reproduce? Does it happen after specific actions, or randomly?

[diraneyya]

Hello and thank you so much for the response.

Now it happens every half hour so I am unable to do development anymore.

I reload the window then it's good again. After half hour the memory usage and the CPU utilization skyrocket.

I am very interested in what you said. You said that native vscode can run in the browser? And in this case how do I connect it to my code-server? Or you are just saying that I can try to use vs code locally but in a browser to see how it behaves.

I never experienced this when running vscode locally.

Do code-server offer troubleshooting commands on the server side? How to see the active sessions and the running processes. I really need to figure out what is causing this.

[diraneyya]

I was using a vs code extension from this project https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence

I have disabled it and since then, I have not experienced this issue once. I think you were right and this had nothing to do with this project. I guess I was quick to assume it was being caused by code-server.

[diraneyya]

It is still happening, even though less frequently than before. I do not have many extensions enabled so I am not sure how to troubleshoot this. When the issue kicks in it becomes difficult to open the process explorer so it is hard to know what is causing it.

Are you familiar of ways to narrow down on what might be causing this?

[diraneyya]

The issue is still here and not gone.

@code-asher I would really appreciate some information on the following:

• So what I understand is that vscode is built in a way that makes it possible for you to make it run in the browser, hence Coder did not have reinvent anything to make this happen. Fantastic! Speaking of which, where is the actual vscode process on the server? is it completely wrapped by the code-server command? is the code-server command made by you? what is the difference between the code-server used when connecting over SSH to the one used by Coder? Many questions!
• In the code-server command line options, there is a mention of an update check that happens automatically every 6 hours, how is this ensured not to interrupt ongoing sessions and is it possible that it is the cause of this screen that I always see every next morning:
  
• After checking my vscode version it turned out to be 3 months old 1.103.2 so does this mean that I have to do something manually to keep it updated? I just now manually installed the .deb release and reinstalled it, reloading the systemd service unit. Seems like something you could have pointed out to me. Or maybe I was too stupid to mention it. I am just learning!
• How to see and manage the ongoing sessions when using vscode via code-server. I mean, unlike native vscode, closing the window does not shut down the processes (and the terminal sessions). So this obviously creates a very different situation and requires different tooling. Does the code-server cli offer ways to do such things?
• Is there a way to troubleshoot the connection between the PWA and the code-server? sometimes code-server PWA gets suddenly very slow and I have no visibility as to what might be causing this.

I am sorry to overwhelm you with so many questions but if my life depends on this thing I have to understand in order to help you keeping it polished and working!