JetBrains Rider experiences long load times or freezes when opening Unity projects

Environment

• IDE: JetBrains Rider
• Engine: Unity

Problem

When opening a Unity project in JetBrains Rider, the IDE takes an excessive amount of time to load (upward of 10 minutes) or freezes entirely during the "processing" stage. This behavior is often accompanied by high CPU usage even on systems with sufficient performance specifications.

Cause

The performance degradation is typically caused by Rider’s background indexing of Unity's text-based asset files in projects with very high numbers of text assets. By default, Rider parses these files to find script and event handler usages (such as identifying which game objects are linked to a specific C# script). In projects with a high number of assets, this indexing process consumes significant system resources and can lead to a hang or an unresponsive state.

Resolution

To restore the baseline performance and prevent the IDE from freezing, you can disable the parsing of asset files. Note that while this significantly improves load times, text-based assets will no longer be discoverable in usage search results because they are not being processed.

1. Open Rider and navigate to Settings → Languages & Frameworks → Unity Engine.
2. Locate the Parse text-based asset files for script and event handler usages option.
3. Uncheck the box to disable this feature.
4. Apply the changes and restart Rider.