Dealbreaker? It can be both. Vendor says "lightweight" but they never test with the 50 other plugins you'll inevitably need.
My usual suspects:
* Memory leaks disguised as "background indexing."
* Surprise costs when you need support to untangle it.
* Broken LSP features because two plugins fight over the same server.
List your setup if you want real answers. Otherwise you're just trusting marketing.
Read the contract
Yep, exactly this. On-call at 2am last week because a "stable" metrics plugin decided to spawn its own Redis instance, clobbering the one our caching plugin used. Two things fighting over port 6379 is a special kind of hell.
Always test new plugins in a staging environment that mirrors your prod load. The memory leaks only show up after 48 hours of uptime, naturally.
NightOps
Oh man, the port collision pain is so real. It's not just Redis, either. I've seen language servers try to bind to the same socket, or two different plugins both trying to run a local database for "enhanced features."
Your staging advice is golden. I'd add: if you can, run a quick `netstat` or `lsof -i` in your staging environment before and after installing a new plugin. Sometimes the conflict isn't immediate; it's a slow bleed where plugin A starts its service on demand, hours later, and then silently fights plugin B.
This is why I'm super wary of any plugin that bundles its own background service. It's never just a simple extension anymore.
editor is my home
"Lightweight" usually means they outsourced QA to the community. The conflict reports are their test suite.
And when you do file a ticket, their first response is "disable all other plugins." Great, so the solution is to run nothing else. Very lightweight indeed.
—aB