Why is the Eclipse IDE getting slower?

Question

I have downloaded the latest Eclipse IDE, Galileo, and tested it to see if it good for developing web applications in Java. I have also tried the Ganymede version of Eclipse and find that is it also good.

My Problem is that sometimes it hangs and stops responding while I am developing. Sometimes when I open a file, Eclipse hangs and does not respond for awhile. It seems that Eclipse is going slower and my job is getting slower because of the time that I am spending waiting for the response of Eclipse.

When I went to NetBeans 6.7, it was good and the performance was good. The loading is faster and the IDE responds well during my development testing.

My computer has 1 GB of RAM and a 1.6 GHz CPU.

What can you say about this?

Answer 1

This is a common concern and others have posted similar questions. There are optimizations that you can perform on your Eclipse environment. Take a look at the solutions posted here.

Answer 2

I'm using Eclipse PDT 2.1 (also based on Galileo) for PHP development, and I've been using Eclipse-based IDE for 3 years now ; my observation is that 1 GB of RAM is generally not enough to run Eclipse + some kind of web server + DB server + browser + other stuff :-(

I'm currently working with a 1GB of RAM machine, and it's slow as hell... Few months ago, I had a 2GB of RAM machine, and things were going really fine -- and I'm having less software running on the "new machine" than I had on the other one !

Other things that seem to affect Eclipse's responsivness is :

• opening a project that's on a network drive (accessing the sources that are on a development server via samba, for instance)
• sometimes, using an SVN-plugin like SUbversive seems to freeze Eclipse for a couple of seconds/minutes

A nice to do with languages like PHP (might not be OK for JAVA projects, though) is to disable "automatically build" in "project"'s menu.

As a sidenote : I've already seen questions about eclipse's speed on SO ; you might want to try so searches, to get answers faster ;-)

Answer 3

Our machines are bigger : 2GB ram, and faster CPU.

I'm sure that, as all software, Eclipse gets bigger and slower when upgrading version, due to all new functionnalities included. The good news is that from time to time, a release also brings some notable performance improvement. But in my experience, each time I tried using a ten-year old software on my current machine, it was lightning fast, so I'm sure the tendency is to get slower. I agree that this is a sad for us, when we don't get a better machine.

There might be some things you can do, to improve the responsiveness of your Eclipse. I don't know if you already tried everything ... ?

Answer 4

My experience has been that NetBeans, Aptana, and Komodo are fast on computers where Eclipse is painfully slow. Maxing out RAM has seemed to help. Any chance you can bump up to 2 gig?

Answer 5

Netbeans sped up quite a bit in the last few years, perhaps your comparison is relative to the speed of netbeans?

Lately I had to up the size of my eclipse -Xmx from 64mb and decided I might as well go to 512, and it got a bit chunkier. at 64 I never saw the slightest pause, when it actually NEEDS a collection at 512 because of a long-running process that's not letting the background GC thread run, it can get a little pausey

I'm running on a pretty old version of eclipse (customized by the cable industry so it can run and display cable apps on a TV emulator) so your mileage may vary.

Answer 6

netbeans is really damn hot, i just didn get it to automatically release my android projects...

thinking of features.. i'd prefere eclipse...

to fasten it up a little more, just disable 'automatic build' doesnt really change anything (build just takes a little longer)

but it's really feelable faster...

but, after 1 or 2 hours, i also have to close, wait, and re-open it.

kind of sucks... (gotta macbook pro, 2.26 (i think) ghz, 3gb ram, gave it a minimum of 768MB of ram, and keeps getting slower..

really sucks

::edit:: I also realized, that after opening a XML file, eclipse instantly gets a little bit more laggy (already disabled XML live compiling, or something similiar, makes no difference :( )