- Extensions Rock -

VS Code users (and there are a lot of us) just love our extensions. There are thousands of VS Code extension to choose from and many of us have several installed. They do everything from lighting up your favorite language, formatting your code, or even colorizing your theme.

Have you ever noticed that some extensions take a few moments to initialize as you start VS Code? What might cause this delay?

What can you do about it? A lot actually. Stay with me to see how you can help your favorite extensions load fast!

One possible cause is the number of files or the size of the extension. Some extensions have so much functionality in them that they can slow down over time.

Wait, Why is that?

When we build apps for the web, we write dozens or hundreds of files in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. We don't want to send 1,000 files across the web to a browser as it may be a poor experience of waiting and waiting. When we write our code it isn't optimized for the browser quite as much as it can be, either. Modern tools help us solve this by compressing the files into a single (or a small set) of files. One popular tool is WebPack.

If you use the command to "Developer: Show Running Extensions" you will see a list of the activated extensions in your VS Code instance. You will also see, to the right, how long each extension took to activate in ms.

Show Running Extensions

This is a great way to find out which ones may be slower activating. Notice the list below from my instance of VS Code shows a few of my installed extensions and their activation times. Obviously, some take longer than others to load, because they do more.

Running Extensions

What can you do if one is taking too long for your tastes? (maybe 1000ms?)

Making Extensions Faster

Recently the VS Code team released the ability to use WebPack to bundle the files in extensions.

The article covers it all really, and it can help when packaging an extension.

I found that my Peacock extension was putting 48 files in the package. I made a few tweaks and I cut this down by a lot.

First, I added some file to the .vscodeignore file

# Files I excluded
azure-pipelines.yml
ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md
PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md
vsc-extension-quickstart.md
node_modules/**/test/**

# After webpack, we have more to ignore
node_modules
out/
src/
tsconfig.json
webpack.config.json

Then I created a new branch for my extension. I went through the steps in the VS Code docs to update my project to use WebPack.

My goals were to make all of these still work:

packaging with npm run package
publishing with npm run publish
local and CI testing with npm run test
F5 debugging with the launch.json
F5 debugging the tests with the launch.json

The approach has me compiling both with webpack and tsc for the tests and debugging.

Here is my project https://github.com/johnpapa/vscode-peacock

Changed my main file in package.json

  "main": "./dist/extension",

My npm scripts in package.json

  "scripts": {
    "package": "npx vsce package",
    "publish": "npx vsce publish",

    "vscode:prepublish": "webpack --mode production",
    "compile": "webpack --mode none",
    "watch": "webpack --mode none --watch",

    "postinstall": "node node_modules/vscode/bin/install",
    "just-test": "node node_modules/vscode/bin/test",
    "test-compile": "tsc -p ./ && npm run compile",
    "test": "npm run test-compile && node node_modules/vscode/bin/test"
  },

My launch.json configurations for debugging the runtime and tests:

  "configurations": [
    {
      "name": "Run Extension",
      "type": "extensionHost",
      "request": "launch",
      "runtimeExecutable": "${execPath}",
      "args": ["--extensionDevelopmentPath=${workspaceFolder}"],
      "outFiles": ["${workspaceFolder}/dist/**/*.js"],
      "preLaunchTask": "npm: test-compile"
    },
    {
      "name": "Extension Tests",
      "type": "extensionHost",
      "request": "launch",
      "runtimeExecutable": "${execPath}",
      "args": [
        "${workspaceFolder}/testworkspace",
        "--disable-extensions",
        "--extensionDevelopmentPath=${workspaceFolder}",
        "--extensionTestsPath=${workspaceFolder}/out/test"
      ],
      "outFiles": ["${workspaceFolder}/out/test/**/*.js"],
      "preLaunchTask": "npm: test-compile"
    }
  ]

And [here is the entire repo where you can see everything in context] (https://github.com/johnpapa/vscode-peacock)

What Kind of Impact Can it Have?

This is a great question, and one we should definitely ask. I mean, after all, to make any code change there has to be some value. I was able to get permission (thanks to the VS Code team and Erich Gamma) to share some performance stats (unofficial tests) of two extensions you may have used.

Both of these extensions have a considerable amount of logic in them and do some pretty impressive and useful things.

Azure Account

The Azure Account extension's size and number of files decreased considerably ... like from "holy moly" to "not bad"!

The warm activation is a term for how long it takes the extension to activate, when that extension has already been installed previously (not the first time). This was cut in half for this extension. Not bad at all!

Download size (the .vsix): 6.2M to 840K.
Packaged files: 4300 to 11
Warm activation time: 676ms to 338ms

Docker

The Docker extension had a noticeable warm activation improvements to under 2 seconds. But the key aspect is the cold activation time. Cold activation is how long it might take the extension to activate when it was just installed.

Warm activation time: 3.5s to <2s
Cold activation time (after 1st install): 20s to 2s