In "Caught Between Two IDEs" the author seems to highlight some of the problems that I also share. IntelliJ IDEA has great features and has been responsible for high levels of productivity in software development. However, operating on a project that contains a large amount of source code it seems to be incredibily slow and prone to being unresponsive for long periods. I've tried optimising its memory and gc settings but it hasn't helped much. Maybe it is time to give Eclipse a try... I'll hold out a little bit longer but am nearly there.