Please post a comment if you have any additional tips to making IDEA faster.

1. The first thing you want to do is disable all the plugins you are not using. Go to *Preferences& -> Plugins and un-check as many as possible. I unchecked about 80%.

2. Give yourself more memory. I figure if Firefox allows itself to take a gig of my ram then I should treat my IDE a little better. So, I gave it two. Find your idea.vmpoptions file (on Mac you can “right” click the IntelliJ IDEA app icon, click Show Package Contents and look in the bin folder.) and tweak start-up settings like this:

-Xms512m
-Xmx2048m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=256m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops
-DlocalHistory.daysToKeep=1

2.1) You might notice the last setting on there is a local history setting. I do a pretty good job at committing anything useful to my version control system, so I keep that at a minimum. Part of me wants to completely remove the local history feature but it doesn’t cost me much to keep it around so I keep it at just a day. You can change that or remove the setting to keep the default.