Find in Files has become painfully slow recently

[DanTup]

Over the last month or so, I've noticed that Find in Files is often incredibly slow. It's a bit inconsistent - it might just be the first time I use it within each session.

Here, I searched for createRunProfile and it found the first result in this file, but then showed an animated progress indicator at the top for probably ~15 seconds before it found the second result which is literally three lines below the first result in the same file.

I don't have many extensions installed/enabled so I don't think it's caused by an extension, but it's not clear to me how I can debug this or provide more information that would help you. My PC is pretty fast (and the open folder - which is the Dart-Code project - is on a fast nvme drive), but even if it was something like terribly slow disk access, that wouldn't explain the huge gap in results that are only three lines apart in the same file.

[albertosantini]

Well, it is a basic operation. If it was so slow, even slightly slow, all the world would notice it.

Did you try with the extension disabled? code --disable-extension

If VSCode works find, you may find the offending extension with F1 and Help: Start Extension Bisect.

I am afraid it is something related with your setup.

[DanTup]

Well, it is a basic operation. If it was so slow, even slightly slow, all the world would notice it.

This seems like an odd comment. I never suggested it was slow for everyone - I said it was slow for me. Not all bugs affect all people, and not all people raise issues when they have problems.

Did you try with the extension disabled? code --disable-extension

I didn't, because as noted above, it's not clear to me how an extension would stall VS Code's own text search and the extension APIs are very limited (I'm not even sure if an extension can contribute to this search at all).

However, you're right that I should've done so to eliminate some variables, so here it is - no extensions, and the same painfully slow search. The first result appears quickly, then it takes a long time for the second result (which is merely 3 lines away) to appear.

slow_search.mp4

I am afraid it is something related with your setup.

Thanks for the input, but I don't think it's clear this is the case at all. It's certainly possible, but knowing the specs and performance of my machine and that these results are adjacent in the same file, I'm struggling to see what could be wrong with my setup to cause this. If you have some suggestions, I'd be happy to investigate them.

[DanTup]

I tried capturing a profile using the developer tools, but it doesn't seem to show much (I'm not sure if it's profiling the right process):

Trace-20250619T144012.json

I also tried using --prof-startup, but that only captured one file (because of #251014), and that file also doesn't show anything interesting (I wonder if capturing the renderer/extension hosts would've revealed more?).

[DanTup]

I did some more testing... I feel like adding this folder to the Windows Defender exclusion list may have made this faster. On non-Dev-drives, Defender makes reading files for the first time after a reboot very slow while it scans them. However, I'm not sure this folder was ever previously excluded, and it still doesn't explain why the first result shows up (so clearly Defender has already finished for that file and allowed VS Code to get the contents of it) such a long time before the second one.

The folder being searched is not particularly large (most of the files are in node_modules which is in files.exclude).

[DanTup]

Some other recent reports that might be the same:

• Search is slow when first searching for something #251289
  it finds some results as you type, then pauses for a long time, then seems to iterate through a bunch of results from other substrings before finally getting to the results for the complete search string
• Search is very slow since Windows 11 #249334