Eclipse 3.5 switching tab is very slow

Question

I am using eclipse 3.5 (cocoa build) on Macos 10.5 with Java 1.5.0.19.

I just have 3 java files opened 1 files ~ 2000 lines the other 2 are ~ 700 lines.

But when I switch from 1 file tab to another, eclipse takes a long time (~ 20 seconds) to switch to another tab.

I have already change the eclipse.ini to

more eclipse.ini
-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.200.v20090520.jar
--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx_1.0.0.v20090519
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.jee.product
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
-Xms128m
-Xmx1024m
-Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts

Is there any way to make eclipse 3.5 more speedy?

Thank you.

Answer 1

This is an known issue. Since you are using JDK1.5, you can try the Carbon variant.

Answer 2

Go with the 32-bit Cocoa release. The 64-bit won't help IMHO. It really works great on my 2.4 GHz MBP. I usually have about 30 files open, some fairly large, never experienced what you describe.

Try to get a new plain-vanilla 32-bit Cocoa distro, don't modify anything and check if there's an issue. It could be a rogue plugin, too. Do you have any installed?

Check you heap status. Open the Eclipse preferences, in the very first preferences page there's a "show heap status" option. You might be running low on memory. Check the swap status of your machine using the activity monitor - if it swaps a lot I'd recommend shutting down other applications. In general, I recommend 4 GB RAM for development machines.

Answer 3

Switching to 1.6 helped! Thanks.

Answer 4

Can you provide a link to the bug report. I have run into the same issue. Switching tabs takes forever now.

Answer 5

I switched this line in the eclipse.ini file (found inside the eclipse application package):

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5

to

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6

and tab switching was speedy again.

Answer 6

This might be the bug that was referred to. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=282229

Answer 7

I experience the same issue using OS X 10.5.7 and Eclipse 3.5.2 on a fairly low end machine (early 2006 iMac with 1.5GB). Right after I start my machine however, everything is really snappy. I can even launch JBoss AS and there is still no slow-down. I monitor "Swap used" in activity monitor, and it stays at 0 bytes swap used.

Then, I launch something else, like iTunes and mail or switching to another account.

Things become slow then, which is expected, and I see "Swap used" increasing. Eclipse slows down to a crawl, and working with it is near to impossible.

Then I logout the other account, close down all other apps that I opened, so the state of my machine is basically the same again as when it was still fast. BUT... it stays dog slow! Even though I closed all the other apps, "Swap used" in activity monitor only decreases a little (from ~1.2GB to ~700MB). Just switching tabs between 2 very simple Java files takes up to 20 seconds, meanwhile I see in activity monitor that the CPU usage goes up to a solid 100%.

There definitely is something strange going on here. This does not seem like normal behavior. It is as-if Mac OS X goes into a 'slow mode' when I demand too much resources from it, but when the resources are there again it fails to recover.

Highly annoying!

If I reset the machine and open the exact same working set again (Eclipse with the same 2 files open, JBoss AS started in debug mode, Safari with 1 window) everything is really fast again.

Answer 8

switching to 1.6 really helps. This is the link to locate eclipse.ini file for mac http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse.ini

Answer 9

I can now more or less confirm that the problem is really with Eclipse 3.5.

I've run Eclipse on a much more powerful Mac, a 27" core I7, 2.93Ghz with 8GB ram and a SSD running OS X 10.6.4. Initially this was extremely smooth and snappy, but after an up time of a dozen hours or so, Eclipse suddenly began to slow-down again. I had very little to almost nothing running in the background. Just Eclipse (32 bits, given it 1.5GB memory), JBoss AS and Safari.

A simple tab switch would take a few seconds and meanwhile I noticed the CPU load on one core going to 100%. The same happened with switching perspectives and various other operations.

When I restarted only Eclipse, everything was completely fast again. This happened a couple of times.