VS Code causes 17.10, 18.04 randomly and completely freeze

So it turns out that this isn't specific to Ubuntu, but I'll post this here anyways for future reference.

Apparently, even though I'm ignoring certain files using the files.exclude setting (notably the ./node_modules directory), VS Code still watches those files for changes.

To solve that, simply copy the list from files.exclude to files.watcherExclude. This will prevent VS Code from searching the many thousands of files that are in node_modules or other similar directories. That way, it will leave some RAM for Chrome to gobble up.

I just ran into this. Upon launch, in a big project, my system would freeze after ~20 seconds and become unresponsive (Ubuntu 18.04). Running htop while launching VSCode showed that it took all the cores to 100% (i7-8700K), ate all the memory (16gb) and then the swap. The freeze happened moments later. This was happening because of a bad extension, in my case it was CSS Peek.

So try launching vscode with extensions disabled (code --disable-extensions) and see if it still happens. If it doesn't track down the faulty extension and send it to hell.

I had random full freezes happening and spent quite a few hours trying to find out why. On restart the logs were really not helpful. I initially thought it was the nvidia driver, but no - just a VSCode extension.

I got the same issue in my Ubuntu 16.04.

I did switch off git.autorefresh in the Settings, then it works flawlessly and smoothly

I've experienced the same problem. Eventually I realized that in my case the problem is running out of memory (I have 8gb ram and just 1gb swap partition on disk). I fixed this by allocating additional swap space using file in my root directory:

sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

this will temporary enable additional 8gb of swap for your system. If it will help, here you can read further instructions for enabling new swap constantly.

Another options are: add RAM physically or add/enlarge swap partition.

I used new swap as a file because I got luks+lvm encrypted system and resizing existing swap partition is too complicated and risky in my case.

P.S. I got Ubuntu 18.04

I had the same issue. To fix this for a particular project you will want to update the .vscode/settings.json to look something like this:

{
  "python.pythonPath": "/usr/bin/python3",
  "files.exclude": {
    "**/.git": true,
    "**/.svn": true,
    "**/.hg": true,
    "**/CVS": true,
    "**/.DS_Store": true,
    "**/node_modules": true,
    "**/.firebase": true
  },
  "files.watcherExclude": {
    "**/.git/objects/**": true,
    "**/.git/subtree-cache/**": true,
    "**/node_modules/**": true
  }
}

For me, disabling gpu when calling vscode solved the problem.

Do it by using this alias to open vscode:

alias code='code --disable-gpu'

I have also suffered from random system crashes when running VSC. Even tried to start without extensions, which didn't help me at all. A few times my system froze right on startup of VSC.

However, I checked the logs and found that these crashes might correlate to the graphics driver (NVidia GTX 660).

Solution in my case: Switching from Nouveau to proprietary driver (I have chosen the metapackage)

Btw: Using Ubuntu 18.04

I had tried above workarounds and no luck.

For me, set the intel_idle.max_cstate=1 parameter in grub worked perfectly.

sudo cp /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.backup
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
# find the line begin with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
# append intel_idle.max_cstate=1 to original parameters.
sudo update-grub

reboot it.

For me following workaround worked

Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P). Run the Preferences: Configure Runtime Arguments command. This command will open a argv.json file to configure runtime arguments. You might see some default arguments there already. Add "disable-hardware-acceleration": true Restart VS Code.

Download VSCode and extract it. You'll see a file name “code” in the folder. Open a terminal and navigvate to that folder. Enter the command

./code --disable-gpu

via phero_constructs on reddit

Also, see this issue comments. You can do CTRL+SHIFT+P, then find Preferences Configuration. Insert this into the json (don't forget to add a comma after the preceding entry):

"disable-hardware-acceleration": true