While I like the product, implementation could be better. Kiro is sitting idle with Helper Plugin using a shitload of CPU for no reason.
While I like the product, implementation could be better. Kiro is sitting idle with Helper Plugin using a shitload of CPU for no reason.
A few things:
1) It's normal for Kiro (and almost every AI editor) to use a lot more CPU when you first start it up, because it is indexing your codebase in the background, for faster and more accurate results when you prompt. That indexing should complete at some point
2) On initial setup of Kiro it will import and install your plugins from VS Code. If you have a large number of plugins this continues in the background, and can be quite CPU heavy as it extracts and runs the installs for each plugin. This is a one time performance hit though.
3) If your computer is truly idle, most modern CPU's get throttled back to save power. When the CPU is throttled, even a tiny amount of CPU utilization can show up as a large percentage of the CPU, but that's just because the CPU has been throttled back to a very slow clock speed.
In my setup (minimal plugins, medium sized codebase, computer set to never idle the processor clock) I rarely see Kiro helper go above .4% CPU utilization, so if you are seeing high CPU it is likely for one of the above reasons.
Thanks for the reply. It was the indexing.
Is there any way to control this? I have my files.watcherExclude setting, does it respect that?
I believe that the file indexing exclusion is based on .gitignore, not files.watcherExclude, but let me check on that and confirm.
I tried with a small project, it worked fine, no high CPU usage.
However with a large project, it seems that it indexed, then dropped CPU, then I started opening up files and working with them, then the CPU spiked again.
I'll look into this. Kiro is supposed to be doing progressive reindexing. When you make a change it should only have to reindex the files that changed. If you have any logs or other data you are willing to share, to help the team investigate you can use the "report a bug / suggest an idea" link at the bottom, or open an issue at: https://github.com/kirodotdev/Kiro/issues
Having ten "Electron Helper (Plugin)" eat a GB of RAM each on idle is the premier desktop experience nowadays. We can't have native apps any more: we don't know how to build them.
It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible.
ActiveX and Java Web Start, etc all tried to do this, and all of them ended up deprecated and out of favor for native web solutions.
Java IDEs did a lot of this for many years (Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans, JDeveloper, etc) and they worked reasonably well on the desktop, but had no path to offering a web hosted solution (like gitpod or codespaces)
There are not a lot of options here, compiling down a native solution to wasm and running it in the browser would work, I'm not sure if the performance would be substantially better or more consistent across all OS'es and web unfortunately.
So we are where we are :)
> It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible.
Qt is pretty good at this actually. I don’t have a Mac, but building the same codebase for windows, linux, and a wasm target was pretty neat the first time I did it.
I use VSCode with Continue. It has a Code Helper Plugin, which peaks during use, but when idle it doesn't use any resource. Something is up with the Kiro version where some background task is running.
See the NathanKP comment on the (grand parent post?), It was the indexing which was causing the resource utiliazation.
For a large project, it seems to still be using high CPU (maybe continuously indexing)
Fortunately the next generation seems to be CLI based! Maybe we'll go back to native apps in the next generation.
Zed exists.