Eclipse IDE speed sluggish on Snow Leopard Macbook

Question

I've recently installed eclipse 3.4 on mac for java and flex coding - I noticed that the eclipse IDE on a mac is much slower than on a PC. By slow, I mean the UI and text editing seems to lag in comparison to eclipse in a windows environment or on a PC.

Are there any tricks to getting eclipse more responsive on macosx?

Answer 1

Switch to 3.5. Eclipse switches to a more appropriate GUI API between 3.4 and 3.5.

Answer 2

Try messing with your eclipse.ini file to optimise things (located in your Eclipse installation directory). Mine looks like this:

Note: this is from a Windows version, and won't work for the Mac

-vm
c:/Program Files (x86)/Java/jdk1.7.0/bin
-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100118.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.1.0.v20100118
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
-vm
c:/Program Files (x86)/Java/jdk1.7.0/bin
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.7
-Xmn100m
-Xms512m
-Xmx700m
-Xss4m
-XX:PermSize=400M
-XX:MaxPermSize=500M
-XX:CompileThreshold=10
-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=10
-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=70
-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions
-XX:+UseParallelGC
-XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods
-XX:+AggressiveOpts

But the important lines are:

-Xmn100m
-Xms512m
-Xmx700m
-Xss4m
-XX:PermSize=400M
-XX:MaxPermSize=500M

as these mess with the heap size, stack size, max memory that can be used by Eclipse, and so forth.

You'll need to retain some element of your eclipse.ini, just copy the bits you need into your own.

Answer 3

My suggestions:

• Use 3.5
• Use Cocoa version (instead of Carbon)
• Make sure you use the Java 6 64bit

Answer 4

Yes, you should move to Eclipse 3.5 with 64-bit Cocoa and all the other INI suggestions are valid.

There are two additions to the JVM switches which are especially important when running in 64 bit on Snow Leopard:

• -XX:+UseParallelGC
• -XX:+UseCompressedOops

For more details, see my full post on installing Eclipse 3.5 on OS X.

Answer 5

Also make sure you get the 64 bit version of eclipse. Upgrading to helios 64 bit solved all my performance issues on my macbook pro.