Jupyter extension starts an expensive workspace search on activation

[LiveFreeAndRoam]

I raised this issue in remote-ssh, but turns out the evidence indicates it is an issue in Jupyter Notebook.

Please see: microsoft/vscode-remote-release#5904

In brief...

Jupyter search is following circular symlinks. This tells me it is ignoring my setting for "search.exclude". I am now going to be trying "search.followSymlinks": false. Does Jupyter honor that setting?

If not, how can I tell Jupyter to exclude search directories or not to follow symlinks?

FWIW, this is also an issue in Pylance (microsoft/pylance-release#1939), where I had to create a pyrightconfig.json file and duplicate my "search.exclude" setting.

It would be far better if all extensions honored some global setting, otherwise I'll be chasing this type of issue forever.

Environment data

• VS Code version: 1.62.2
• Jupyter Extension version (available under the Extensions sidebar): v2021.10.1101450599
• Python Extension version (available under the Extensions sidebar): v2021.11.1422169775
• OS (Windows | Mac | Linux distro) and version: Windows 10
• Python and/or Anaconda version: Python3
• Type of virtual environment used (N/A | venv | virtualenv | conda | ...): N/A
• Jupyter server running: N/A

Expected behaviour

XXX

Actual behaviour

Jupyter search consumes 100% CPU as it get stuck in circular symlinks.

Steps to reproduce:

Please see: microsoft/vscode-remote-release#5904

Logs

Please see: microsoft/vscode-remote-release#5904

[rchiodo]

Thanks for the issue.

Search for notebooks is actually implemented in VS code core. Transferring the issue there.

[roblourens]

I didn't realize that the jupyter extension was starting a search through the entire workspace:

vscode-jupyter/src/client/datascience/interactive-common/notebookUsageTracker.ts

Line 31 in fa8bb5d

const findFilesPromise = this.workspace.findFiles('**/*.ipynb');

Please don't do this unless absolutely necessary, searches can be very expensive

[rchiodo]

@roblourens we use this to gather telemetry on the number of notebooks in a workspace. Is there an alternative?

[roblourens]

Do you absolutely have to have that info? If so, maybe you could limit the search to run for 5s.

If I open my home folder, and activate the jupyter extension, the search runs for minutes and my machine looks like this:

extensions running searches is one of the top things that leads to people saying that vscode is "slow" or "bloated" so we really want to avoid this. I just noticed that the python extension is doing this too.

[rchiodo]

Does VS code have this in its own telemetry (extension counts for workspaces?)

@ronglums @claudiaregio do we still use notebook count telemetry in a workspace for anything?

[roblourens]

We do something to collect file counts, but it doesn't use ripgrep, has some low max count, and is careful to avoid too much system impact

[rchiodo]

Sounds like we can drop this then. You have an equivalent.

[roblourens]

I mean we don't report the number of notebooks, just total number of files

[rchiodo]

Could that be modified to indicate extension?

[roblourens]

Probably wouldn't count on it

[ronglums]

I'll let @claudiaregio comment on whether this data point is still in use.