Speeding up RubyMine on linux

I use RubyMine for development on Ruby on Rails platform. A lot of my friends and colleagues using it often have the opinion that it is a resource hog and slows down the system. I have also observed a little slowness. Of late, the effect increased and crossed my tolerable limit. So, I decided to dig in and find out what was happening. Using top, I could see that for some reason a process jbd2 was being triggerred every 2 seconds. Reading about it, I found out that it was the process updating access time. I am using ext4 filesystem and I had not specified the noatime option in fstab for the partition. So, access times for files were being updated in real time. I do not need that at all. Access times are updated even for page cache hits, which is of no use to me. So, I turned it off by changing the mount options for the partition.

Now, it was time to look into RubyMine in particular. I was using 64-bit version of it and it is well known that the 64-bit version has deteriorated performance initially because the default heap size is set at the same value as the 32-bit version. I had already taken care of it by changing the heap size from 512 mb to 1536 mb. To do this, you can edit bin/rubymine64.vmoptions and edit it to reflect the following.

-Xmx1536m

Another important property that I had not set was the ReservedCodeCacheSize. It was also having the same value as the 32-bit version, i.e. 64mb. Changing it as follows, improved performance.

-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=256m

This ensured a good deal of code could be cached in memory making RubyMine's operations faster.