How do I prevent Eclipse from hanging on startup?

Question

I am using Eclipse 3.3 (\"Europa\"). Periodically, Eclipse takes an inordinately long time (perhaps forever) to start up. The only thing I can see in the Eclipse log is:

Answer 1

no need to delete entire metadata file. just try deleting the .snap file from org.eclipse.core.resources on your workspace folder

ex. E:\workspaceFolder\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources

Answer 2

In Ubuntu eclipse -clean -refresh worked for me for Eclipse 3.8.1

Answer 3

Well, I had similar behaviour while starting eclipse over X11. I forgot to tick the enable X11 forwarding in my putty.

Answer 4

Since I don't have a .snao or .prefs file in .metadata.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources folder (running on OS X), what did the trick for me was copy the .project folder to old.project, start Eclipse, and check

Windows -> Preferences -> General -> Startup and Shutdown -> Refresh workspace on startup

as proposed by matt b. After that, I closed Eclipse, renamed the folder old.projects back to .projects and after that everything worked fine again.

Answer 5

In my case deleting the .metadata folder of the workspace worked. I am using Eclipse Luna service Release 2.

Answer 6

I had no snap files. Going through the help menu installation list, at least 90% of my plugins had the uninstall button deactivated so I could not handle it through there. Under startup/shutdown most of plugins were not listed. Instead, I had to manually remove items from my plugins folder. Wow, the startup time is much faster for me now. So if everything else does not work and you have plugins that are disposable, this could be the ultimate solution to use.