To speed up IntelliJ products, immediately open Settings -> Directories and exclude all unnecessary folders. Otherwise a crawler background process will indexes every file, and it consumes a lot of CPU and IO resources.
In one extreme example, my project was a scraper that scraped in 80k images or so, and IntelliJ was essentially unusable until I did this (16 gig of ram, SSD, i7 quad core etc), and completely fine afterwards.
So if anyone is having performance problems, please do check this out.
Excluding the log directory is extra important. It's empty when you create the project, but will probably keep growing and gradually slow everything down the more you work.
Great advice! I need to exclude large data-only folders in my project directories and if I sometimes forget to do this then the IDE is not as performant.
