Improving the performance of the popular Clojure development tool clojure-lsp

The author shares their experience optimizing the Clojure language server (clojure-lsp) to improve performance when dealing with large codebases, specifically in the context of the Metabase project. Initially, clojure-lsp's startup time was significantly long, attributed to inefficient heap usage and frequent garbage collection. By increasing the heap size and employing tools like VisualVM and clj-async-profiler, the author identified several inefficiencies within clojure-lsp, particularly related to the clj-kondo library. Key optimizations included refining the deep-merge function, improving the rewrite-clj library, and enhancing Clojure's memoization method by reducing unnecessary allocations. These efforts resulted in a substantial reduction in execution time and memory allocation, leading to a two-fold improvement in performance. The optimizations have been merged into clojure-lsp and verified by its maintainer, Eric Dallo, though further improvements are anticipated to continue enhancing the tool's efficiency for large-scale projects.

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