XCode Performance

I am using XCode 11.3.1 and and iMac, 2017, 3.4GHz, Quad core i5 with 16GB of memory, Catalina 10.15.2. XCode seems very slow at times (e.g., startup, build times, preview times, simulator launch). It is particularly a problem for preview. Preview operations seem to take minutes at times. Using the activity monitor, I note that CPU utilization is low (well below that of a single core), memory pressure is low, and there appears to be minimal disk activity. The only culprit I can think of is network access. Network access may come into play because my project is located in Documents and Documents is on my iCloud Drive. Network access may also be an issue if XCode is extremely chatty for reasons of which I am unaware. My network latency is estimated to be 50ms.


Even so, if I move everything off iCloud, there is no noticable change in performance. I have also encountered file not found errors on added files that were located on iCloud drive and not copied where the files had not be downloaded yet.


What should I be expecting?

Up vote post of jgmorris1@mac.com Down vote post of jgmorris1@mac.com
530 views
Posted by
jgmorris1@mac.com
Reply
Add a Comment

Replies

Yes, bottom line is that Xcode performance is an issue, and has been an issue for some time.


You're right, Xcode is chatty. Communication to the backend is it's bread/butter, with everything from code signing to doc downloads to the same general application performance metrics all Apple products attempt to feed back to the mothership. If you agreed to participate in feedback to Apple on that computer, Xcode is just one application constantly phoning home. Opting out can help, I think.


iCloud may help Apple, but I don't care for the delays while Apple gets what it needs out of the bargain. You can't even open Settings on your mac without waiting for it to update remote caches. It may speed things overall by providing access across devices, but you pay for that by waiting upfront while they all check in on the backend first..not much of a benefit in my book.

Posted by
KMT
Up vote reply of KMT Down vote reply of KMT
Add a Comment