Extension causes high cpu load

[rootsongjc]

• Issue Type: Performance
• Extension Name: vscode-front-matter
• Extension Version: 10.9.0
• OS Version: Darwin arm64 25.0.0
• VS Code version: 1.104.1

eliostruyf.vscode-front-matter-unresponsive.cpuprofile.txt

Find more details here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/Explain-extension-causes-high-cpu-load

[estruyf]

Hi @rootsongjc, is this for every project you open? Normally, the indexing which happens when you configured it for your project can indeed take some CPU load until it indexed all your content.

How "big" is the project? Number of files it tries to index? You can get this information by running the frontMatter.diagnostics command.

[rootsongjc]

My Hugo website:
│ ZH │ EN
─────────┼───┼──
Pages │ 1999 │ 798
Paginator pages │ 158 │ 31
Non-page files │ 816 │ 160
Static files │ 244 │ 244
Processed images │ 0 │ 0
Aliases │ 859 │ 204
Cleaned │ 0 │ 0

Front Matter CMS - Diagnostics

Beta: false
Version: 10.9.0
OS: darwin
VSCode version: 1.104.1

Total files

Total files found: 154191

My Configuration

I followed this doc to configure the page folders and exclude some subfolders.

[estruyf]

Thanks, that gives me a bit of insight. So almost 3000 pages, that can indeed take a bit of time to index all. Once it's completed, it should be much faster, as it's starts using the index instead of the individual files.

[davidsneighbour]

In my experience with content and front matter (both YAML and plugin) freezing, it may be related to the way Hugo formats specific front matter (YAML) values when creating content. Date formats without quotation marks ("it's a go time object as opposed to a string"), Titles and descriptions without quotation marks.

Which all might be allowed/valid per standard, except for titles that have colons or even quotations inside. Frontmatter (the plugin) then goes into some form of loop or freezes. When I switched to Astro and set my linting to OCD it complained about these frontmatter values and after having it all quoted both systems stopped having issues with indexing.

Example:

key: some value with "weird" content
key2: some value with another problem: colons in it

Long story short: Frontmatter stopped re-indexing and/or throwing errors for frontmatter after I changed to a very strict quoted frontmatter format for everything.

[rootsongjc]

After optimizing the configuration of frontmatter.json, the issue of nested pageFolder in previous configurations has been resolved, and the python venv directories have been excluded. After one day of observation, the FM extension has not frozen again. This indicates that the above adjustments may have effectively resolved the issue.

[estruyf]

Thanks @davidsneighbour for stepping in!

Thanks @rootsongjc for the update. Glad you found the fix and that you got your CPU load back to normal. ☺️