Eclipse IDE is slow

To speed up Eclipse IDE, you need to edit eclipse.ini, which is right where eclipse.exe is located. Go to the bottom of this article for the settings I have.

You would want to make sure that following lines are in it.


-Xms512m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

Background

I have to use Eclipse IDE for the job I took 6 weeks ago.

Fine. So I go to the Eclipse web site.

It looked like there are a bunch of pre-configured packages for Eclipse, depending on what you indent to do with it. Since I am expected to do lots of server side stuff, Java EE seemed the right choice for me. So I downloaded it and installed it (which just involves un-zipping the entire contents to an arbitrary folder - a surprise to a .NET developer like me)

I never really used Eclipse before, so I wasn't ready, but the first impression I had was "holy cow, its so slow!" It was sluggish, non-responsive, and every time I did almost anything, it took like few seconds to sometime few minutes, not kidding! (Note, the machine I was given had 24 GB of memory with Xeon processor).

For example, when I switch my tab to view an XML file, it took like few seconds for it to show the content. When I did a right-mouse click on a Java editor, it look like a few seconds to show the menus. I probably killed the Eclipse (and its associated java process) several times using Windows Task Manager when I was staring at Eclipse splash screen for a couple of minutes. It was just not usable.

So, I Googled and found out that basically the default Eclipse IDE configuration is too conservative about its memory use, in terms of JVM (an equivalent of .NET run-time). 

There are lots of recommended configurations out there, but having these lines that mentioned earlier did the job for me.