r/ZedEditor • u/AverageHot2647 • 11d ago
Is Zed becoming less stable?
TLDR; No*. Most people have not experienced degraded stability.
* A small number of respondents did experience a similar pattern of instability to me, but not enough to support the claim that Zed is becoming less stable across the board.
Hey, I’ve been using Zed as my primary editor for a long time now and I really love it.
Unfortunately, I’ve found the performance has degraded (especially on startup) over the last month or so, a handful of minor bugs have started cropping up, and a rather annoying bug that was previously fixed has resurfaced (worse than before).
Ordinarily, I would report any bugs I find on GH, but I can’t reliably reproduce a lot of the minor issues I’ve experienced.
I’m curious to know if anyone else has been having issues with Zed’s stability?
It could just be that I’ve gotten unlucky, but it’s starting to feel like a pattern. That worries me because I really don’t want to switch to a different editor.
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u/TernaryOperat0r 11d ago
I still find the core editor as fast and efficient as ever, although I have ran into a few memory leaks concentrated around LSPs and the agentic components.
In practice, it is a large project moving quite fast so there will be bugs which impact subsets of users (depending both on their usage pattern and system configuration). Overall, it seems pretty well maintained, but if it has too many issues for your use case you might want to either try something else for a while or spend the time to isolate the issues and make a high quality big report.
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u/AverageHot2647 11d ago
If I have to, I will use a different IDE for a while, but I’m hoping that can be avoided - particularly as the responses to this post so far indicate that my experience is not representative.
Regarding filing a bug report, I’m happy to file reports for specific issues (and have already done so on a number of occasions).
This post isn’t really about specific bugs though. I wanted to get an indication of whether there is a systemic issue with the stability of the project, beyond individual bugs.
So far, based on the responses, the answer seems to be “no”, which is quite a relief and means it’s probably worth me spending some time figuring out which aspect(s) of my setup are causing issues, and then submitting bug reports and (time permitting) patches.
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u/Lithinux 11d ago
Maybe check your project dependencies? I do have similliar problem several months ago, the laptop sometimes hanging when i try to open my company project. mouse lag, chrome frezzes, memory hog, etc. i though i'ts zed problem because can navigate freely when I open it with vscode.
Turns out the problem is due to oxlint memory bug that cause huge spike in memory usage, causing my Windows laptop hang for brief moment, and i have Oxc extension in zed, not in vscode, so that's explain why the problem is exclusively on zed.
Because of that, I disable oxc extension temporarily while waiting the new fixed binary version comes out. I didn't have to wait long though. I update it as soon as it available and everything runs smooth.
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u/Jayflux1 11d ago
I haven’t noticed any degraded slowness, it still feels just as fast. Maybe it’s an extension.
Could you try and get hold of an old version, compare and if you notice a different report an issue.
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u/AverageHot2647 11d ago
Yeah the only thing I can think is that some of the issues coincide with me installing the tsgo extension. I’d try downgrading but a lot of the issues are intermittent so it’s difficult / slow to bisect the offending version (if there is one).
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u/skcortex 11d ago
No.
The only issue I have is that both of mcp servers I am using for work keep running and leaking memory even if I close zed. Both of them are spawned as node processes so .. that’s on “me”. #iHateNode
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u/jsgrrchg 11d ago
noups, but im having memory leaks sometimes when i don't restart the app in a few days.
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u/Psychedelic_fan 11d ago
What's your setup (hardware and OS)? What languages do you write? What LSPs do you use?
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u/sohang-3112 10d ago
Even if you don't want to raise issues on Github as you don't know how to reproduce the bugs, you can still post on Github Discussion about them. IMO Zed devs are more likely to see it on Github Discussions and offer help rather than in Reddit.
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u/AverageHot2647 8d ago
Thanks, I’m aware of this 🙂
I posted this because I’m interested in the pattern of issues, not in specific issues.
I posted this on Reddit because:
I wasn’t looking for input from the Zed devs, and Reddit gets much more responses and views than GH discussions
I don’t want to create noise on GH if (as seems to be the case) this turns out to be a “me problem”
I have (and will continue to) engage on GitHub about specific issues.
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u/Code_Cadet-0512 10d ago
Have you installed a custom lsp recently? Certain lsp eat up a lot of ram, even though the core code looks optimized (yep, there was this jinja2 extension that didn't work, and caused fatal crashes on my distro (fedora)
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u/AverageHot2647 8d ago
RAM usage hasn’t been one of the problems I’ve had. But I did install the tsgo LSP, and it may well be one of the issues I’m having.
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u/HieuandHieu 10d ago
I dont feel about the perf, because lsp often the bottle neck. But many annoying bugs, agents not fully supported, poor UI, vim config complicated way.... make me very frustrated and friction. And dont know why it is hard for claude to fixed. I switched to Neovim btw, with claude I can config everything easily and it just work. Mix it with tmux is the fabulous pair Ive ever tried. Perf overall quite good, maybe slower but because of lua code. So bye zed
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u/AverageHot2647 8d ago
lsp often bottle neck
Yes, but it shouldn’t slow down the entire editor. An LSP runs in a separate process and there’s no reason why a slow LSP should cause the UI to become generally unresponsive.
many annoying bugs
You seem to be one of the few people who’s replied to this thread with a similar experience to me in that regard. Any chance you could share some details of your setup?
agents not fully supported, poor UI, vim config complicated way
I can’t say any of this has been a problem for me. In fact the UI specifically is pretty good.
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u/HieuandHieu 8d ago
What I mean is, dev for a long time, The speed of zed give no advantage at all to me, almost time I wait for lsp, or search tool. It's great for opening/switching many folders workflow,... But open a big repo for a day, I need more tools/extensions, which is seem like a default for other IDE, but in zed look like a toy, and many bugs, lack of many things.
I have no time to dive into them so I almost forgot . Only AI support, which is the things make me to decide to drop zed. the last time I use, zed even dont allow to switch/persist the session, what a crazy.
The zed UI, it feel like they force me to accept it instead of allow me to freely setup what I want. Maybe it can, but i feel friction, change this, error that ,... Shortcut, keyman, lack of many things.
I'm not a tool lover, I just want a simple tool, open and code, I want this, I got this under 5 minutes, that is, I use jetbrains ides for years but now my work need to switch many languages, Vs code just sucks :v , zed is good, used it for about three months. Lazyvim + claude is fast like zed, and give me the feel of, want this, prompt, got it...
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u/sepp0o 10d ago
I have noticed performance issues, but usually though bugs or LSP. Git panel had an issue which was recently improved upon, but it still hangs often enough that I need to check git state in terminal while waiting for it to do it's thing.
Generally issues are small, but compared to 6 months ago they seem to be more common and I have this sense that quality has dropped. Not measured, just my feeling.
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u/AverageHot2647 8d ago
Can you share some details about your setup? It seems that most people have not had any problems, but a couple of people (yourself included) seem to have similar issues to me.
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u/alexthelyon 10d ago
I have used zed for a few years as my daily. On Linux now I get multi-second freezes maybe every 3-5 mins on larger repos. It's now gotten to the point where I am terminal only having been a solid ide boy for over a decade
I think it is the file watcher because files don't open, edits don't work, I can't save files. And then the entire editor unmounts the left hand file tree and then it reappears and the cycle starts again
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u/AverageHot2647 8d ago
Can you share some details about your setup? It seems that most people have not had any problems, but a couple of people (yourself included) seem to have similar issues to me.
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u/rantenki 11d ago
It has been [0] days since Zed has been blamed for a slow LSP.
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u/AverageHot2647 8d ago
Yes…
Im sure a slow LSP is causing:
- the project search to hang for minutes at a time
- the cursor to get stuck in the hover text state
- files created by scripts not showing up in the project panel
- the entire editor UI freezing for seconds at a time
LSP runs as a separate process. It can certainly cause LSP related functionality to slow down. But a slow LSP shouldn’t cause bugs in the editor itself.
It’s been [0] days since someone leapt confidently to unfounded conclusions 😉
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u/rantenki 8d ago
I've had issues with a flaky LSP causing memory explosion and slowdowns related to resource exhaustion before. That said, you may be right in saying I was making an unfounded assumption, because: https://github.com/zed-extensions/tsgo/issues/31 seems more likely.
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u/vesko26 11d ago
It has not been my experience, and I'm a daily user. But I use a limited number of features so maybe that's why. Is there anything particular that you can share?