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

                       **Tips for making Eclipse IDE Faster**

Eclipse will run faster when working with small projects. But when you have to work with large project, you will get irritated with its speed. Even with a huge RAM you will not be happy with its speed.Below steps will help eclipse to increase its speed

1. Remove unwanted activation of some of the plugins at start-up by going to windows–>preference–>General–>Startup and shutdown also make sure you don’t use those plugins in any of your views

2. Disabling label decorations which is of less use for you, will also help you to gain some performance . Go to Windows–>Preference–>General–>Appearance–>Label -> Decorations

3. Close unwanted projects and use working set option to move from one group of project to another smoothly.

4. Configure eclipse.ini which will be available in the eclipse installed location.

   Configuring eclipse.ini should be based on your RAM
   -Xms256m
   -Xmx512m
   -XX:PermSize=512m
   -XX:MaxPermSize=512M

Also have a look at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse.ini for more options to configure eclipse.ini.

5. Do not keep lot of tabs opened in the editor. Better to have around 20 tabs . Regularly close the unused tabs. To open resource we can always use ctrl+shift+R and ctrl+shift+T (java resource) instead of opening lot of tabs I experienced a considerable improvement in performance when limiting the number of open tabs (In the past I frequently had 30+ tabs open). You can let eclipse handle this for you automatically: Window->Preferences->Editors-> close editors automatically 8 open tabs is the amount before the >> sign appears, so I set 14 as my default value. When opening more tabs, the ones the least recently accessed will be closed. When all editors are dirty or pinned. If it has unsaved modifications you can prompt to save & reuse (tab will be closed, a new one will be opened in its place). Or you can open a new editor end thus increase the amount of open tabs (the unobtrusive choice). If you want to ensure some tabs never get closed autmatically, you can pin them. This by clicking on the pin icon (the rightmost icon in the toolbar, with “pin editor” as tooltiptext).

6. Go to Windows -> Preferences -> Validation and uncheck any validators you don’t want or need.

7. Go to Windows -> Preferences -> General -> Appearance -> and uncheck any animation you don’t want or need.

8. Go to Windows -> Preferences -> Maven and check 'do not automatically update dependencies'.

Answer 2

If you use Maven and ivy do check out their consoles in case they are hogging processing during builds. I use ivy and on top of that I have certain JAR files (internal) changing with same version, so it has to workout all the time to fetch them.

If you have defined you project on a network drive then you will also experience lag during build/read/write type of processes.

• Disable/uninstall plugins you don't need.

• Close perpective that you don't need

• Close unused database connections

Answer 3

Apart from configuring eclipse.ini for memory usage. I have configured by "Start up & shutdown options". My Eclipse is blazing fast now.

Answer 4

Thanks for the hints. These options (mentioned above) helped me a lot:

Windows:

Increasing memory & regarding to my updated Java version in eclipse.ini:

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6
-Xms512m
-Xmx512m
-XX:PermSize=512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512M
-Xverify:none

Additionally, since we are optimizing for speed, setting -Xms to the same value as -Xmx makes the JVM start with the maximum amount of memory it is allowed to use.

Linux / Ubuntu:

Using

update-alternatives --config java

Answer 5

Disable virus scanners, or at least configure any virus scanner to not scan JAR files on read access.

Answer 6

Another performance boost can be gained by disabling label decorations (Windows -> Preferences; General -> Appearance -> Label Decorations) and by disabling unused capabilities on startup (Windows -> Preferences; General -> Startup and Shutdown).

You may also get additional performance by choosing a different garbage collection strategy depending on your JVM.

If you're fed up with restart cycles you could use JavaRebel from ZeroTurnaround. That will shorten your time spent on server/client restarts.