Disabling telemetry in ByteDance's VSCode fork increases data sent to its server

Summary

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE: A Deep Dive into ByteDance's VSCode Fork Executive Summary This analysis examines concerning performance and privacy issues discovered in Trae IDE, ByteDance's fork of Visual Studio Code. Key findings include excessive resource consumption (33 processes vs 9 in VSCode), persistent telemetry transmission despite user settings, and concerning community management practices. 1. Background and Methodology During evaluation of development environments for a personal project, I conducted a comparative analysis of three popular IDEs: Visual Studio Code, Cursor, and Trae (ByteDance's VSCode fork). This analysis revealed significant discrepancies in resource usage and network behavior that warranted deeper investigation. Testing Environment: OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro CPU: Intel Core™ i7-14700KF RAM: 64GB Test Project: Identical codebase loaded in each IDE Monitoring Tools: System Informer, Fiddler Everywhere 2. Resource Consumption Analysis Process Count and Memory Usage Initial testing revealed dramatic differences in resource consumption: IDE Process Count Memory Usage Performance Impact VS Code 9 ~0.9 GB Baseline Cursor 11 ~1.9 GB 2.1x memory Trae 33 ~5.7 GB 6.3x memory Figure 1: Trae spawns 3.7x more processes than VSCode and consumes 6.3x more memory Community Feedback and Partial Resolution After reporting this issue on Trae's Discord server (reference), the development team acknowledged the problem. Version 2.0.2 addressed some concerns, reducing the process count by approximately 20 processes. However, Trae still maintains significantly higher resource usage than comparable IDEs. Post-Update Metrics (v2.0.2): Reduced from 33 to ~13 processes Memory usage down to ~2.5 GB 3. Network Traffic and Telemetry Investigation Initial Discovery Network monitoring revealed persistent outbound connections to ByteDance infrastructure: Figure 2: Trae's network activity showing regular connections to ByteDance servers Primary Endpoi...