"The Pylance server crashed 5 times in the last 3 minutes"? (circa v2023.10.40 of the Pylance VS Code extension)

Question

Every time I launch VS code, the Pylance server crashes 5 times in in 3 minutes, or so the output terminal says. The server stops trying to relaunch and I lose out on a handful of features as a result. Anyone else know how to resolve this issue?

This is the little crash message I get on launch

I've tried completely removing the python extensions and reinstalling as per someone's recommendation, but that didn't help. This began happening out of the blue. No updates that I noticed, and no files deleted on my part.

Answer 1

Update your Python and Pylance expansions to the latest version.

Or install pre-release version.

If the error continues, follow these steps:

1. Uninstall Python extension (if you have pylance uninstall it first). Uninstall any other extension that is failing.
2. Close all instances of VS Code.
3. Go to, %USERPROFILE%/.vscode/extensions (on windows) or ~/.vscode/extensions on Linux/Mac.
4. Delete any folder with the name starting with ms-python.python*
5. Start VS Code, and install Python extension (also pylance if you uninstalled it in step 1).

Answer 2

Considering the timing of this question being posted, I suspect that this might be a case of the type of issue described in Pylance server crashes 5 times without restart every time I open VSCode on Win11 #5055. Go check that issue ticket out.

• One user reported that they get those crashes with version 2023.10.40 to version 23.10.50 of the Pylance extension, and that rolling back to 2023.10.30 "fixes" it.

• You could also try switching to the pre-release channel, which at the time of this writing is at version 2023.11.11. Another user reports that they no longer have the issue in version 2023.11.10.

Several users report that they get the issue once they install the AWS Toolkit extension.

If that issue ticket doesn't match your issue ticket, see these other ones that cropped up near the same time:

• Pylance crashed immediately after open VSCode #5009
• Pylance crashes upon startup: [info] Error: [UriError]: Scheme contains illegal characters. #5032