At start of the IDE downloading the 39Mb library_index.json takes minutes to hours.

[ednieuw]

Describe the problem

When the IDE is started it start downloading packages. This takes minutes on a fast PC with high speed glasfiber internet and on a older PC it takes forever as I noted at a friend his PC with probably slower internet.
The IDE can not be used properly when the packages are downloaded.

At first I blamed the Espressif esp32 package I had in my Additional boards
together with the Earl Philpower package_rp2040_index.json
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/gh-pages/package_esp32_dev_index.json was the last line in the Additional boards.

"Downloading package ....". is what is displayed Right under in the IDE window in a annoyingly placed window. (This window blocks the last lines of information)

"..." is probably the last packages in the additional boards but not what it is downloading and causing the problem

After I removed all additional boards but now I see downloading library_index.json is probably the blame.
This is a json file of 39MB with 967379 lines of text!!

To reproduce

Start the IDE for the first time at the start of a new day.
Probably the file is downloaded two a three times per day but difficult to reproduce
After a successful download the IDE does not download the packages for several hours

Expected behavior

A fast startup like the IDE1 where there is no noticeable time of installing packages at startup.

Arduino IDE version

2.3.3 nightly 20240422

Operating system

Windows

Operating system version

W11

Additional context

No response

Issue checklist

• I searched for previous reports in the issue tracker
• I verified the problem still occurs when using the latest nightly build
• My report contains all necessary details

[per1234]

Hi @ednieuw. Thanks for taking the time to submit an issue.

I see we have another report about this at arduino/arduino-cli#2347.

It is best to have only a single issue per subject so we can consolidate all relevant discussion to one place, so I'll go ahead and close this in favor of the other.

If you end up with additional information to share, feel free to comment in the other thread.

[vdevan]

I downloaded the latest Arduino IDE v2.3.3 today. This problem still exists. I had two files in this order
http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/gh-pages/package_esp32_dev_index.json
First one gets downloaded second one hangs. I deleted the second one but now the first one hangs
After deleting the files the ide hangs on
Downloading index: package_index.tar.bz2
This has nothing to do with JSON files. Something bizarre on background task of downloading. I am running Windows 11 Pro 23H2 build: 22631.4169 on a Dell Laptop Processor: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11390H @ 3.40GHz 2.92 GHz with 16GB memory
Needs rectified ASAP. Never had this issue in previous versions