Tools menu is ridiculously slow on MacOS

[MCUdude]

This issue has become worse and worse with the recent IDE releases. When I first open Arduino IDE and click on the Tools menu, it appears on the screen immediately. However, as soon as the message "Updates available for some of your boards and libraries" it becomes incredibly slow, and it can take up to 20 seconds from I click the Tools menu before it appears. While I'm waiting, the cursor is just a spinning ball.

Is this somehow caused by the boards manager? FYI I'm running Arduino 1.8.10 and MacOS 10.14.5

[facchinm]

It looks like #7924 is back 😢
Could be a duplicate of #9260 but the "Updates available" trigger could help debugging the issue properly.

[MCUdude]

I'm not getting any significant lag if I don't enter the tools menu.

[AIlgorithm]

Can confirm the issue (running on my MacOS 10.11.6 and Arduino 1.8.10 ).
If you try to select the Tools menu after the long delay the first time, it display quickly. Any upload or compile will trigger the delayed display again.

[delcomp]

Also confirm this issue. It appeared around 1.8.5 and has never been away since. Old 1.9.0 beta releases did solve it, but current 1.9.0 beta has the same problem. I use a Mac, Catalina (but this problem migrated from 10.14). It's now getting very annoying. Why is this long standing issue still not solved.

[facchinm]

It's still not solved because we haven't been able to reproduce yet. A useful debug could be running the ide inside a java profile and report which function blocks.
In case of #7924 it was due to a bug in java, it may be the same (but to be sure we need to reproduce it first or get some proper debug log)

[delcomp]

Strange, I'm having this problem now for more then one year. Anyhow, I'm not a Java specialist, but if you tell me what to do, I can maybe make the log and send it to you. Glad to help you if it can help to remove this annoying bug.

[PaulStoffregen]

The #7935 fix was only partially effective. The first time clicking the menu after changing boards is very slow when many extra libraries are added. This impacts Teensy, since we include about 80 libraries with the platform package. I understand it's a problem deep within Java that probably can't be fixed without Oracle's help.

[PaulStoffregen]

If you're feeling adventurous and you have a pre-Catalina Mac, you could try hacking a newer copy of the IDE with the older Java runtime. To do this, you'd control-click each copy of Arduino and "show package contents". Then in each IDE, look in the Contents/MacOS and Contents/PlugIns folders. The JRE from Oracle is in Contents/PlugIns and the startup program is in Contents/MacOS. You might need to copy both, or maybe just copying Contents/PlugIns from an older copy (where the menus were fast) is enough? But this runs afoul of Gatekeeper. Before Catalina, it would not complain if you had already run the IDE once (to get past the downloaded from the internet warning) and you keep the files in the same place. Catalina tightens Gatekeeper security, which is probably a good thing in the long term for the Macintosh ecosystem, even though it closes the door to this sort of experimentation.

[delcomp]

And which Java version is considered to be ok, i.e. without the delays?
I could try removing the Arduino IDE, then re-install it, replace the Java runtime, finally to a first start. Maybe that solves the Gatekeeper issue.

[delcomp]

PaulSotffregen, thanks for the tip. I replaced JavaAppletPlugin.plugin with the version of Arduino 1.8.5. And problem solved. Thanks a million times, this saves a lot of time and frustration.

I tried several versions, up until 1.8.5 it works perfectly. The JavaAppletPlugin.plugin included with Arduino 1.8.6 and higher have the annoying delay problem.

And no issues with Gatekeeper, I could just replace the file.

[MCUdude]

I replaced JavaAppletPlugin.plugin with the version of Arduino 1.8.5.

I also tried this, but with the one from 1.8.4. Problem solved for me too!

[facchinm]

Unfortunately we can't revert the bundled jre version for a million reasons (like security issues and missing certificates from the embedded keychain).
I'm currently producing some hourly builds using AdoptOpenJDK jres (https://adoptopenjdk.net/archive.html), they should be available in a few minutes.
If you could test them and report if you see any outstanding bug it would be great

[delcomp]

Yes I can test that. Just tell me when the hourly build is available and were I can download it.