How can you speed up Eclipse?

Question

How can you make the experience with Eclipse faster?

For instance: I disable all the plugins I don\'t need (Mylyn, Subclipse, …).<

Answer 1

I also tuned vmargs and stuff. But what really sped up Eclipse on Windows is the "proper" configuration of the anti-virus software. You have to disable the on-demand scanning of packed files. jar files, and many files related to java are packed with PKZIP algorithm to spare space. Because Eclipse uses tons of java files, an anti-virus attempts to individually unpack and scan every one of them. So for Windows platform: turn off the on-demand scanning of packed files, otherwise Eclipse will be unusably slow. Please keep in mind, that disabling this unfortunately makes your system weaker against attacks, most of the malware use packers.