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
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