Jupyter for vscode continues to be slow.

[loftusa]

Every few months I try to use vscode for jupyter because I would really love to just use vscode for everything. Every few months, I am disappointed and switch back to the web version.

There are two reasons for this:

1) Jupyter for vscode continues, stubbornly, to essentially always be more slow than traditional jupyter lab on localhost. Look at the run times in this screenshot. It took me a minute to run imports; when I ran the exact same code on the localhost version, it took 7.7 seconds (pictures attached). This is an extremely consistent theme in vscode jupyter. Cells will sometimes randomly take minutes to run, and will sometimes not even run at all until you press 'shift-enter' on them twice. This has been true for me across multiple computers, in many different dev environments.

Cells also just randomly take forever to run, for god knows what reason. Here is a screenshot of assigning a string to a variable taking 27.4 seconds:

Note that I am not trying to blame the team here, I am just frustrated because this is so close to being a great product, but this one thing holds it back, and it keeps not being fixed for years on end. The very first thing I would do as a product manager if I were in charge of vscode-jupyter is to pause all current tasks and plan, with the team, a multiple-month effort to speed things up, and get cells to run effectively instantly (or as close to the amount of time the python processing of the code takes as possible), every time.

2) Jupyter for vscode sucks at inline documentation, the equivalent of shift+tab in vscode jupyter. I am aware of the existence of the trigger parameter hints and show hover settings in the keyboard shortcuts. These are extremely unreliable, and actually show documentation when I press the button maybe 1/5 of the time. When they do show documentation, there is a 'loading' tag for awhile. Browser jupyter, on the other hand, is immediate with this. Basically every time. Below is an example.

The other issue with inline documentation is that, as far as I can tell, hover documentation for methods on instantiated variables simply doesn't work. When I am using pandas, for instance, typing df.unique( and then pressing the show hover hotkey while my typing carat is to the right of the parenthesis pops up a documentation window saying exactly nothing. In contrast, in the web version, typing the same thing produces full documentation, as expected.

I don't understand how these two issues aren't your guys's top priority. Everyone I've spoken to who uses jupyter has had exactly the same experience as I have, and everyone I've spoken to who uses jupyter uses the web version exclusively for exactly these issues. Even Kaggle notebooks are better. I love copilot and it'd be great to bring it into my jupyter notebook experience, but it has just never been viable to switch if I don't want a workflow where I have to wait for 30 seconds every time I press command-enter, or I am frustratingly making a new cell above the current one and typing function? just to see documentation.

These issues have been ongoing since vscode jupyter started. They are the only things holding me and everyone else I've spoken to back from using it. Without fixing these issues, the whole thing is unusable, and no other features you guys put in matter. Why are you guys working on anything besides this when they are the only things anyone I know cares about?

I should note that this is all running in a docker container with access to 7 of my 8 cpus and 10gb of RAM. I am on a 2022 macbook air. I realize that this is a rant, so thank you for reading it. Nothing personal, I just think this product has a bunch of potential and I hate to see it unusable for so long.