The first EAP for PyCharm 5.1 was released last week, with lots of enticing features. Here's one that jumps out for long-time users: "Debugger performance improvements". Let's take a look at this in a little more depth, then provide some of the back story.
Almost 3.5 seconds of improvement on OS X.
5.7 seconds! That's a meaningful difference. As stated by the developers, the debugger is 40% faster in the general case and over 130% faster when you have the Cython modules compiled and installed. Again, if you are on Windows, you don't need to do anything — you will get these improvements automatically for Python 2.7, Python 3.4, and Python 3.5 interpreters.
Note the "-2.7" in the directory name. Also, note that you don't have to do this with your virtual environment's Python, but it certainly makes sense to do so, as you'll be sure to match the version. You don't have to do this once for every Python 2.7 virtual environment, as these speedups aren't stored in the virtual environment. They are stored inside PyCharm's pydevd helper.
Now, on to the backstory. As explained in the blog post announcing the 5.1 EAP, JetBrains joined efforts with PyDev, helping sponsor the work on pydevd which is shared by the two projects. Both projects require a sophisticated debugger backend and previously merged their work. This performance improvement is another step forward in the collaboration.
If you debug a large code base, give this EAP a try with the Cython speedups and post a comment letting us know your results. We expect performance improvements to be higher for larger code bases.
I tried running (/usr/bin/python2.7 /usr/lib/pycharm-community/helpers/pydev/setup_cython.py build_ext –inplace) as directed by the warning (and by this article), but it failed (as my normal user, not sudo or as root, on Ubuntu 15.10).
When I ran PyCharm again and started the debugger against a script it didn't report the warning to run setup_cython.py . So it seems the installation was finally complete.
This procedure shouldn't require running as root, or even as sudo. In fact the Ubuntu .deb that my normal update process offered me to install from the normal Ubuntu repos should have the dependency on setup_cython.py included, not as a separate procedure we have to find in this blog entry. And if installation does depend on reading this blog entry, the blog entry should specify that running as root will be necessary. And the setup_cython.py script should indicate success when it succeeds.
Please open the ticket in https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/PY so the responsible developer will be able to pick it up. You will be able to track the progress and get a prompt response and technical help there.
Running into similar issues, cannot get this to work, and documentation is sometimes ambiguous. IDE on Mac, Code on Ubuntu, but cannot find find setup_cython.py on Ubuntu 14. I installed pydevd through pip, and with apt-get python-pip, python-dev, cython, but alas no setup_cython.py.
You're right that it should "just work" on Linux. I'm on the road so I don't have easy access to try and reproduce it.
I don't see a ticket in our issue tracker for this: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/PY If you can file it, we can get it looked at.
Could you please file it as a bug https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/PY ? We'll take a look and notify you on the ticket status.
If we could do anything more than 100% faster, that would have thrown us in the past!..
Sorry for the spiteful comment, but consider a car going at 100kph: if it's later going 130% faster, it's going at 230kph. If it has a set distance to cover, it will now cover that distance in 100/230 or ~43% of the time.