Initial setup

After an upgrade or installation, make sure you give it enough memory.

Edit bin/idea.exe.vmoptions and change the JVM parameters to suit your setup:

-Xms128m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=250m
-ea

Otherwise, it can behave very slowly.

You can also edit bin/idea.properties. I’ve changed all my paths to use my fast SSD.

# path to IDEA config folder. Make sure you're using forward slashes
idea.config.path=e:/.IntelliJIdea90/config

# path to IDEA system folder. Make sure you're using forward slashes
idea.system.path=e:/.IntelliJIdea90/system

# path to user installed plugins folder. Make sure you're using forward slashes
idea.plugins.path=e:/.IntelliJIdea90/config/plugins