Chapter 7. Troubleshooting CodeReady Workspaces

Role: Administrator

When starting a workspace, OpenShift pulls the images from the registry. A workspace can include many containers meaning that OpenShift pulls Pod’s images (one per container). Depending on the size of the image and the bandwidth, it can take a long time.

Image Puller is a tool that can cache images on each of OpenShift nodes. As such, pre-pulling images can improve start times. See https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_codeready_workspaces/2.4/html-single/administration_guide/index#caching-images-for-faster-workspace-start_crw.

Role: Administrator and user

Every workspace has a shared volume attached. This volume stores the project files, so that when restarting a workspace, changes are still available. Depending on the storage, attach time can take up to a few minutes, and I/O can be slow.

To avoid this problem, use ephemeral or asynchronous storage. See https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_codeready_workspaces/2.4/html-single/installation_guide/index#configuring-storage-types_crw.

Role: Administrator

Components of CodeReady Workspaces are OCI images. Setup Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces in offline mode (air-gap scenario) to allow for reducing any extra download at runtime as everything needs to be present from the beginning. See https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_codeready_workspaces/2.4/html-single/installation_guide/index#installing-che-in-a-restricted-environment.adoc.

Role: User

When selecting various plug-ins, each plug-in can bring its own sidecar container, which is an OCI image. OpenShift pulls the images of these sidecar containers.

Reduce the number of plug-ins, or disable them to see if start time is faster. See also https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_codeready_workspaces/2.4/html-single/administration_guide/index#caching-images-for-faster-workspace-start_crw.

Role: Administrator

For each endpoint, OpenShift is creating OpenShift Route objects. Depending on the underlying configuration, this creation can be slow.

To avoid this problem, reduce the exposure. For example, to automatically detect a new port listening inside containers and redirect traffic for the processes using a local IP address (127.0.0.1), the Che-Theia IDE plug-in has three optional routes.

By reducing the number of endpoints and checking endpoints of all plug-ins, workspace start can be faster.

The IDE editor uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve content. Check that the content uses a CDN to the client (or a local route for offline setup).

To check that, open Developer Tools in the browser and check for vendors in the Network tab. vendors.<random-id>.js or editor.main.* should come from CDN URLs.

Plug-ins consume CPU resources. For example, when a plug-in provides IntelliSense features, adding more CPU resources may lead to better performance.

Ensure the CPU settings in the devfile definition (devfile.yaml) are correct:

apiVersion: 1.0.0

components:
  -
    type: chePlugin
    id: id/of/plug-in
    cpuLimit: 1360Mi 1
    cpuRequest: 100m 2

Plug-ins consume CPU and memory resources. For example, when a plug-in provides IntelliSense features, collecting data can consume all the memory allocated to the container.

Providing more memory to the plug-in can increase performance. Ensure the memory settings in the plug-in definition (meta.yaml) are correct:

apiVersion: v2

spec:
  containers:
    - image: "quay.io/my-image"
      name: "vscode-plugin"
      memoryLimit: "512Mi" 1
  extensions:
    - https://link.to/vsix

In the devfile definition (devfile.yaml):

apiVersion: 1.0.0

components:
  -
    type: chePlugin
    id: id/of/plug-in
    memoryLimit: 1048M  1
    memoryRequest: 256M 2