The 20-second+ delay in finding IDEs is not an acceptable user experience

[sharkymark]

I'm very excited we resolved the failed to find IDEs, or at least keep retrying until we do, but the first time I use Gateway and a running workspace, it always takes 20+ seconds.

Can we redesign something to improve on this, or give a status message on what is going on, to keep the user engaged?

[code-asher]

@sharkymark do you see any kind of delay when running the binary directly on the command line? For example something like this emulates what Gateway calls:

 ~/.local/share/coder-gateway/dev.coder.com/coder-linux-amd64 --global-config ~/.local/share/coder-gateway/dev.coder.com/config ssh dev

Replace platform, arch, and domain as necessary, and I think on macOS the data directory is ~/Library/Application Support/coder-gateway.

[code-asher]

I have been experimenting trying to reproduce this. I have not been able to reproduce 20+ second delays but here is the behavior I currently see from the moment I press "Select IDE and project" (currently testing on macOS and the demo site):

1. 8 seconds after restarting a workspace
2. 4 seconds on subsequent attempts

And with the built-in SSH functionality from the moment I press "Check connection and continue" it takes 11 seconds regardless of whether the workspace has just started or not.

When I use coder ssh on the command line it takes 4 seconds, which I think correlates to the 4 seconds I get in the plugin on subsequent loads. This is further supported by how if I kill the background connection with pkill coder-darwin-amd64 for example then I get bumped back up to 8 seconds.

The other 4 seconds I believe is doing the actual IDE scan so I am not sure we can do anything to improve this.

In that initial 4 second gap there is nothing in the logs so I think this is that coder ssh command spinning up. If I am right about this then @sharkymark you might be seeing up to a 16 second delay when running coder ssh manually. It might also be useful to know what terminal is used (I am using the default terminal app). Example of how I am running it:

export domain=example.com
"/Users/test/Library/Application Support/coder-gateway/$domain/coder-darwin-amd64" --global-config "/Users/test/Library/Application Support/coder-gateway/$domain/config" ssh --stdio example-workspace-name

If this is the case we can raise it on coder/coder and hopefully figure out what is going on. I can reproduce a massive delay if I run from a terminal that does not support certain codes but I am not sure that is what is happening here.

I think we can distinguish between the connection establishing and when the editors actually start scanning so I will start with that to help it look less stuck.

[matifali]

I was also not able to reproduce this. Closing for now. We can reopen if it surfaces again and we have reports.