Android SDK plug-in appears to impact Eclipse heavily

Question

Am I the only Eclipse developer whose workbench quickly sputters, wheezes, crashes or hangs and makes me use Windows 7 Task Manager to hard-bounce it?

I've got dedicated, Android-only (as it were) installations of Eclipse Helios (3.6) and Galileo (3.5) with the very latest Android SDK (0.9.7.v201005071157-36220) using android-sdk_r06-windows.zip. I'm running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, but 32-bit Eclipse (Helios and Galileo) and a 32-bit jdk1.6.0_20.

It is true that these are both Eclipse JEE installations and not the bare-bones Java-only (non-WTP) versions. I haven't tried that yet. I followed a tutorial that said to use Helios, but said nothing about what not to include (like WTP which I ordinarily use in my work).

I can avoid much of the trouble by editing XML files using the standard Eclipse XML Editor and avoiding the Android SDK's various XML editors, but very quickly, things stop working and the whole thing caves in on itself.

I've tried bumping memory in eclipse.ini, -Xms128m, but that hasn't helped.

I'm looking to hear from someone who's gotten over this mess or who knows what I should have done.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any and all comments.

Russ Bateman

Answer 1

Add this line -XX:MaxPermSize=256m to your eclipse.ini file right after -vmargs. I have no idea why, but apparently it's a known bug. I can get you the source where I found this solution if you'd like, it took me a fair bit of googling

Answer 2

After a week of frustration I reached the conclusion that you cannot install Android for use in Eclipse JEE, my usual mode. Instead, use the plain Java Eclipse. My definitive installation became Eclipse Galileo SR2 IDE for Java Developers. I added these lines to eclipse.ini, though I probably did not have to be so generous:

-vmargs
-Xms256m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:PermSize=128m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m

In order to distinguish this version of Eclipse from my usual JEE development version on my task bar, I found an icon to graft onto it at http://www.large-icons.com/stock-icons/free-large-android-icons.htm and selected one that looked most like the green Android icon.