Sublime Forum

CPU usage on my Mac is high – What are these packages?

#1

macOS Hgih Sierra on a late 2013 MBPr 15’’ (2,6i7, 16gb ram, 512ssd, geforce 750m 2gb)
latest SublimeText 3 (build 3143)

My SublimeText constantly sucks up around 20 percent of cpu %, when it’s just open (monitoring it as I write this)
While working it often goes up to 50 or higher. Sometimes there are multiple processes with the name “Sublime Text”, but only one has the App-icon. Before the “official v3 release” it never got up this high– my fan is going crazy;

I usually have 2-4 projects open at the same time. One is always in fullscreen.

I read a little bit and was adviced to clean up packages. So I go CMD+P > “Browser Packages”

Here is a screenshot of the folder. The marked ones are the ones I know of installing by myself.

What do I do with these unknown ones? My memory tells me this folder used to be really clean. Can I delete them? And where do they come from? How can I prevent this from happening.

Sorry if all of this may be already covered in the forums; I currently don’t have the time to go really deep into this… deadline is hitting hard and I need this thing to work quickly. Hope you understand.

Thank you!

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#2

Possible sources of high CPU usage could be indexing of files (say if you have a large project open). There are also known performance problems in the latest stable release due to the underlying OS being silly that could be the culprit as well. The latest dev release has a fix, although there are still some quirks to be worked out.

The User folder is always there and is where your settings are stored. Generally, package names with a lower case name are dependencies (e.g. mdpopups) that were installed because they are required for one of your installed packages to work and packages with upper case names (e.g. PlainTasks) are “regular” packages.

Most packages are generally going to be installed as sublime-package files, but some (for example PlainTasks) are installed as unpacked files in this folder instead.

Deleting a dependency is not a particularly good idea unless you know that all packages that need it are no longer installed; best case Package Control notices when you start next and puts them back, worst case it doesn’t notice and things will start failing in mysterious ways.

If you want to play around with deleting packages, your best bet is to back up the entire folder so you can get back to a working state if things go pear shaped.

All that said, just because a package is installed doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a CPU drain. You can select Tools > Developer > Profile Plugins from the menu to see a list of all plugins that might do something and how much time they’re spending doing things.

Using that you can see if something is spending a lot of time doing something and, if so, temporarily add that package to the list of ignored_packages to see what the effect is. In particular, items under on_selection_modified or on_modified are probably the biggest drains because they potentially do something every time a buffer is modified or the selection changes.

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