Description
vscode appears to use ripgrep for file searches in two places: ripgrepTextSearchEngine.ts and ripgrepFileSearch.ts. ripgrep has a -j/--threads argument with a default value of 0, which "causes ripgrep to choose the thread count using heuristics", which is to say that it's implicitly multithreaded with some unknown number of threads.
I believe this is the root cause of a number of other issues filed with excessive CPU/memory usage by ripgrep (e.g. #203425), though certainly launching too many rg processes can be a problem regardless.
One issue I haven't seen reported is that on a distributed file system, having too many file search threads running simultaneously can severely degrade performance. In fact we're seeing a single user able to cause a weka filesystem to hang for a minute or more just through a remote VScode session launching one or two ripgrep processes.
I'd like to request a configuration option to set the number of threads (the -j argument to rg) wherever ripgrep is used. I'd prefer the default to be 1 to disable implicit multithreading, but 0 would be fine as long as the configuration option exists.