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

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

For Eclipse 3.7, you use Windows -> Preferences -> General -> Startup and Shutdown.

Answer 2

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 tend to leave it at 8.

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).

Answer 3

I give it a ton of memory (add a -Xmx switch to the command that starts it) and try to avoid quitting and restarting it- I find the worst delays are on startup, so giving it lots of RAM lets me keep going longer before it crashes out.

Answer 4

In special cases, bad performance can be due to corrupt h2 or nwire databases. Read Five tips for speeding up Eclipse PDT and nWire for more information.

Where I work, we are dependent on a VM to run Debian. I have installed another Eclipse version on the VM for testing purpouses, but this sometimes creates conflicts if I have the other Eclipse version running. There is a shared folder which both of the Eclipse versions shares. I accidentally left the Debian Eclipse installation running in the background once and that gave me corrupt database files.

Answer 5

On Windows 8. Open Control panel. Find Windows Defender. Go to settings Exclude all folders where is your Spring/Eclipse and workspace

Answer 6

Make an effort to configure your build path. Code completion uses a lot of memory if it has to go through your whole project folder.

• Right click on your project and choose preferences.
• Choose your build path setting and remove your project folder.
• Then add only the folders where you have your source code and library code.