Hi all,
I wish to fine tune my eclipse.ini file to best suit my system and development environment.
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse.ini is not very helpful.
I would like to know for example:
Given a processing power of X RAM Memory of size Y and Java version Z; What the values of -Xms & -Xmx should be.
Generally speaking, is there a guide or tutorial out there, and if not what has practice taught you?
It's really situation dependent. However keep in mind that these are standard Java VM parameters, not eclipse specific.
In any case, here's a rundown on how to decide:
Xmx is your maximum heap size - If you're going to be using some really memory intensive plug-ins, you're going to want to increase your Xmx size to at least 1024m (-Xmx1024m) whileas if memory is not that important (say you're running vanilla eclipse) it really doesn't matter. Another time that you'd want to increase this is if you're consistantly running out of memory.
Xms is your minimum heap size - Again, if you KNOW you're going to be using a ton of memory, why waste time growing the heap? You can start the heap at a specific size immediately. For example, you can set it to -Xmx256m and your heap size will start at that.
If you're really looking to tweak eclipse's memory settings, you can't overlook the -XX:MaxPermSize parameter (you set it via -XX:MaxPermSize=256m) which increases the maximum permanent generation space. By default, Java's PermGenSpace is really small so you may receive errors related to this as you load more and more plug-ins into eclipse.
Check this out: What are the best jvm-settings for Eclipse