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've disabled all unused options in Windows > Preferences > General and it has a huge positive impact on performance, eclipse is still slow when switching tabs, I don't want to increase memory, but it's a lot faster when scrolling. Thx for the tips.

Answer 2

One more trick is to disable automatic builds.

Answer 3

Eclipse loads plug-ins lazily, and most common plug-ins, like Subclipse, don't do anything if you don't use them. They don't slow Eclipse down at all during run time, and it won't help you to disable them. In fact, Mylyn was shown to reduce Eclipse's memory footprint when used correctly.

I run Eclipse with tons of plug-ins without any performance penalty at all.

• Try disabling compiler settings that you perhaps don't need (e.g. the sub-options under "parameter is never read).
• Which version of Eclipse are you using? Older versions were known to be slow if you upgraded them over and over again, because they got their plug-ins folder inflated with duplicate plug-ins (with different versions). This is not a problem in version 3.4.
• Use working-sets. They work better than closing projects, particularly if you need to switch between sets of projects all the time.

It's not only the memory that you need to increase with the -Xmx switch, it's also the perm gen size. I think that problem was solved in Eclipse 3.4.

Answer 4

The only real way to hasten Eclipse with the standard plug-ins is to give it more memory and in some cases access to a faster storage space / defragmented hard drive.

Beyond that there is not much you can do performance-wise: most standard plug-ins do not have a continuous runtime cost, even Mylyn is relatively fast.

Upgrading to the latest JVM supported on your machine may help as well.

Some people downgrade to older Eclipse versions to get better performance. It may also make sense to use Eclipse classic instead of the official releases.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

Not to be underrated is having a fast machine. 16-32 GB of RAM, SSD and a decent processor... and who0o0om there you go.