I recently experienced a severe slow debugging experience in IntelliJ + nodejs plugin / WebStorm, which made me to wait nearly one minute for my app to start. I tried to figured out why, and I noticed that the most of the time was spent on loading various packages.

Later on I found the cause for such slowness: the IDE’s break on exception option is enabled. In other words, the IDE will try catch almost every line of JavaScript code, no matter it is written by you or it is from a third party package, which leads to a huge performance loss.

Disabling it by navigating through menu ‘RUN -> View Breakpoints…’ and toggle ‘JavaScript Exception Breakpoints’. You will have your program debugging much faster. To further accelerate your experience, navigate through menu ‘Help -> Find Action…’, type in ‘Registry’ and enter. Uncheck ‘js.debugger.v8.use.any.breakpoint’.

Now your nodejs program should run in debug mode as fast as it is not.