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Atom is slow regaining focus on Windows and Linux with git repo

   February 26, 2021  10 Comments on Atom is slow regaining focus on Windows and Linux with git repo

Atom has a delay of ~1 second to respond to input when re-focusing. Seems to only affect Atom when a project folder is in a git repository.

Steps to reproduce:
Open Atom
Add a directory to your project that is a git repository or a subfolder of a git repository.
Open a file or create a new document in the same Atom session.
Switch to a different application.
Click back on Atom and wait for your input to be accepted.

When you click back on Atom there is a delay of 1~1.5 seconds before your action is performed (tab switch if you clicked a tab, cursor to start blinking if you clicked in the text of a document).

I ran the profiler during the task switching and I got the following data (rename the file to .json if necessary):
TimelineRawData-20151112T091728.txt

I am able to solve the issue only by removing the git folder from my project.

I’m not versed in reading the profiling data but it looks like a call to git-repository.js is taking a lot of time up when the re-focus happens.

Full dicussion on github.com

10 thoughts on “Atom is slow regaining focus on Windows and Linux with git repo”

  3. Not just windows I think. I noted this in a cpu trace on linux 64 bit, Debian betsy. Node version v5.7.1. Atom 1.4.0

    self total function
    81975.5 ms 89.42 %% spawn
    81975.5 ms 89.42 %% internal/child_process.js:251
    81975.5 ms 89.42 %% child_process.js:343exports.spawn
    81975.5 ms 89.42 %% child_process.js:18exports.fork
    81975.5 ms 89.42 %% /usr/share/atom…src/task.js:26Task
    81975.5 ms 89.42 %% /usr/share/atom…src/task.js:13module.exports.Task.once
    76882.4 ms 83.86 %% /usr/share/atom…ository.js:365module.exports.GitRepository.refreshStatus

    Edit: Still exist on atom=1.7.1 linux 64 bit, Debian betsy, node=5.10.1.

  6. Also experiencing this on Windows 10. Every time the window regains focus I get an annoying pause before it becomes responsive. For me, the pause is about 1.6s which doesn’t sound like a lot but when you’re constantly switching back and forth during testing, it’s really noticeable. I opened the developer tools and the profiler shows that GitRepository.refreshStatus() is 100%% to blame for the pause.

  7. Confirmed:

    • macOS Sierra: 10.12.6
    • Atom: 1.18.0 x86

    I generally work on 6+ projects at a time in one Atom view, all Git repositories… and switch in and out of Atom/Terminal/Browser/etc constantly. Sitting at ~2-3sec refocus lag which is incredibly distracting and killing efficiency. I’ve disabled all un-necessary packages which didn’t seem to help at all.

    Any ETA on a resolution? This is unfortunately tetering on unusable.

  9. Fresh install Ubuntu 16.04, latest atom. Randomly freezes (as in I have to kill the process and restart atom) when alt+tab back to atom. Did not happen with Ubuntu 14.04.

    Anyone have a workaround for this? Is this a different issue?

  10. Hey everyone; I’m really sorry this went unaddressed for so long. It is fixed on master and will ship in Atom 1.22.0 (and 1.22.0-beta0 if you’re on our beta channel).

    The way we solved this was to introduce new native APIs for refreshing the git status on a background thread; that way we don’t need to spawn a child process.