How To: Resolve Poor Performance on Raspberry Pi 4 When Running Visual Studio Code

Occasionally, I will hack around on a Raspberry Pi 4 with my son.  Recently, we had been creating a fun home motion detection home security system.

We had been using Thonny as it shipped with the Pi installation and was running smoothly.

The simple interface was good for my son.

I installed Visual Studio Code.  It was unusable.

The performance was terrible.

The slightest click or cursor movement took ages.

The PI has 8GB of RAM so should be fine.

After a little digging, it turns out, you need to disable hardware acceleration.

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Visual Studio Code

To do this, press F1 in VS Code, type runtime:

Select: Preferences, Configure Runtime Arguments

The file will load, you need to set this to the following:

That’s it.

Visual Studio Code is now useable in the Pi.

In a future post, I will share how we built an AI home security system using .NET, Semantic Kernel, Telegram, and Raspberry Pi.

Stay tuned.

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