GitHub Copilot Chat in WSL experiences 40-80 second startup delays due to CopilotCLIChatSessionContentProvider.listSessions

[vishalnarayan2809]

Describe the bug

Environment

• VS Code: 1.122.1
• GitHub Copilot Chat: 0.50.1
• WSL: Ubuntu
• OS Host: Windows 11
• Copilot account: Educational quota
• Remote Development: WSL

Description

GitHub Copilot Chat takes approximately 40-80 seconds to become available when running inside WSL.

The delay is reproducible across VS Code restarts and occurs even after:

• Clearing Copilot state
• Clearing workspace storage
• Reinstalling Copilot Chat
• Disabling local indexing
• Reducing workspace index size
• Disabling memory features
• Disabling MCP features
• Optimizing Git settings
• Verifying filesystem permissions

The extension itself activates quickly, but startup appears blocked by CopilotCLIChatSessionContentProvider.listSessions.

Observed Logs

ConversationFeature: Waiting for copilot token

[CopilotCLIChatSessionContentProvider] listSessions took 40514ms

Logged in as <account>

Got Copilot token

Copilot Chat: 0.50.1

Failed to create database. Falling back to in-memory db: Error: unable to open database file

Subsequent calls are fast:

[CopilotCLIChatSessionContentProvider] listSessions took 14ms
[CopilotCLIChatSessionContentProvider] listSessions took 38ms
[CopilotCLIChatSessionContentProvider] listSessions took 5ms

The large delay occurs only once during startup.

What Has Been Verified

Extension activation is not the problem

VS Code reports:

GitHub Copilot Chat
Activation: 2348ms

Network is not the problem

time curl -I https://api.github.com

Result:

real 0m0.174s

Session database is tiny

session-store.db       4 KB
session-store.db-shm  32 KB
session-store.db-wal 149 KB

Session state is tiny

du -sh ~/.copilot/session-state

Result:

4.0K

Workspace indexing does not affect the issue

Tested:

"github.copilot.chat.localIndex.enabled": false
"github.copilot.chat.workspace.maxLocalIndexSize": 100

No measurable improvement.

Git is not the problem

Git operations complete in milliseconds and repository scanning is fast.

Additional Observation

Copilot reports:

Failed to create database. Falling back to in-memory db.

However, Copilot successfully creates:

~/.vscode-server/data/User/globalStorage/github.copilot-chat/session-store.db
~/.vscode-server/data/User/globalStorage/github.copilot-chat/session-store.db-wal
~/.vscode-server/data/User/globalStorage/github.copilot-chat/session-store.db-shm

which suggests the failing database may be a different internal store.

Expected

Copilot Chat should become available within a few seconds, similar to Codex and other AI extensions running in the same WSL environment.

Actual

Copilot Chat consistently requires 40-80 seconds before becoming usable due to an extended listSessions operation during startup.

Reproducibility

100% reproducible across restarts.

Affected version

No response

Steps to reproduce the behavior

No response

Expected behavior

No response

Additional context

No response