How can I reduce Eclipse Ganymede's memory use?

Question

I use the recent Ganymede release of Eclipse, specifically the distro for Java EE and web developers. I have installed a few additional plugins (e.g. Subclipse, Spring, Find

Answer 1

Instead of whining about how much memory Eclipse takes, just go ahead and analyze where the problem is. I might be just one plugin.

Check the blog here : "analyzing memory consumption of eclipse"

Regards, Markus

Answer 2

I'd call it bloated, but not leaky. (If it was leaky it would climb and climb until something crashed.) As others have said, memory is cheap! It seems like a simple decision to me: spend a tiny bit on more memory vs. lose productivity because you don't have the memory budget to run Eclipse @ 500MB.

Summarized rhetorical question: What is more valuable:

1. The productivity gained from using an IDE you know with the plug-ins you want, or
2. Spending $50-200 on some memory?

Answer 3

I don't know about Eclipse specifically, I use IntelliJ which also suffers from memory growth (whether you're actively using it or not!). Anyway, in IntelliJ, I couldn't eliminate the problem, but I did slow down the memory growth by playing with the runtime VM options. You could try resetting these in Eclipse and see if they make a difference.

You can edit the VM options in the eclipse.ini file in your eclipse folder.

I found that (in IntelliJ) the garbage collector settings had the most effect on how fast the memory grows.

My settings are:

-Xms128m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=120m
-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=10
-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=70
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:+CMSIncrementalMode
-XX:+CMSIncrementalPacing

(See http://piotrga.wordpress.com/2006/12/12/intellij-and-garbage-collection/ for an explanation of the individual settings). As you can see, I'm more concerned with avoiding long pauses during editting than actuial memory usage but you could use this as a start.

Answer 4

Just for information,

• you can add

  -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote

to your eclise.ini file, launch eclipse and then monitor its memory usage through 'jconsole.exe' found in your jdk installation.

C:\[jdk1.6.0_0x path]\bin\jconsole.exe

Choose 'Connection / New connection / 'eclipse' to monitor the memory used by eclipse

• always use the latest jvm to launch your eclipse (that does not prevent you to use any other jfk to compile your project within eclipse)

Answer 5

Eclipse is a pretty bloated IDE. You can minimize it by turning of the automatic project building under Project -> Build Automatically. It also can be helped by closing any open project you are not currently working on.

Answer 6

Well, you don't specify on which platform this occurs. The memory management may vary if you're using Windows XP, Vista, Linux, OS X, ...

Usually, on my computer (WinXP with 1Gb of Ram), Eclipse take rarely more than 200Mb, depengin of the size of the opened projects, the loaded plugins and the ongoing action.