Any way to view what Atom is doing in the background?

#1

Hi,

Sometimes, usually post-update but also when packages are being updated/installed, Atom starts to
chew the CPU for what would seem like a long time.

I’m using Windows 8.1, and I can’t see any obvious way to have Atom run in a mode that would show me
either in a status window in Atom itself, or in a log or terminal what it is that is happening in the
background when this work is being done.

Is there some way I could get this kind of information rather than simply a pretty animated button or something? Most other IDEs I’ve used have provided a plugin or add-on where the IDE’s output/logs can
be viewed.

Thanks,

Darren.

#2

ctrl+shift+i will open the Chrome devtools, which has performance timelines, etc. There’s also the JavaScript console, but I’m not sure if anything of value is logged there.

#3

Atom usually has a long startup time after updates because it has to rebuild the compile cache.
The timecop package (timecop:view) shows you if any files were re-compiled.

#4

Thanks for the suggestion.

I do a lot of debugging in Chrome, so I’m familiar with it - it’s more
w.r.t. what is happening outside of the main Atom editor, like when
apm is being run or other background tasks - the transparency of
this kind of thing is not very good I think (for me at least).

#5

This is certainly interesting to see - I do seem to have a lot of packages that are taking either a large load time or a large activation time - I have installed many of them since I require various language support, so I need a lot of them - maybe not all of the time, but often.

I did see an issue w.r.t. having perspectives like in Eclipse, and that would certainly help if I could
deactivate packages for certain projects to save resources.

#6

Atom update download patch, so immediately after update are downloaded and is restarting full files has to be reconstructed from diff.

but also when packages are being updated/installed,

There may be node.js dependency management going on here. That may include compiling some native stuff.

#7

I’ve no problem with that needing to be done - but I would like to be able to ‘watch’ what is happening - especially in the cases when things are, potentially, going wrong.

I tend to run the latest beta builds, and keep packages up to date, which can mean that things
do go wrong - as a developer my self, I like to be able to determine if this is something I should debug
or something that I should just let happen…

Should also add, I’d like to contribute, and this is part of my way of learning what is happening - by observation - right now Atom doesn’t seem to want to make that easy.