Eclipse + PDT performance tips?

Question

I recently wanted to get a decend IDE for my PHP side-projecs, and by searching SO found Eclipse+PDT. Although it's not quite at the level of Visual Studio yet, it's pretty nice and better than Notepad++ for this purpose. I can even debug somewhat, although it's pretty glitchy.

But there is one thing that is bugging me. It seems to have some kind of weird performance issue, whereupon it it uses lots of CPU about once a minute or so. By itself this is not noticeable, but if you do something else at the same time (like watch a movie, or play Quake 3), it produces an annoying hicup now and then.

Granted, my computer is not state-of-the-art (Sempron 2200+ with 1GB of RAM), but then it's certainly more than enough for all of this.

Another performance question is that I'm used to Visual Studio where IntelliSense pops up as soon as you type a compatible symbol. Here you have to wait for a moment. Is there any way to make it open up instantly?

P.S. Perhaps there's an even better freeware IDE for PHP?

Added: It was suggested by Stefan Schmidt to change Auto-Activation speed. It seems that there is a bug with this. The smaller I set it, the more it fails to open at all. For example, when it's 200, it opens mostly all the time when there is something to open. At 10 it doesn't open (at least) for static class members. What gives?

Answer 1

My PC is much lower specced, and PDT runs smoooothly, I would check for another reason this is happening.

Answer 2

For your second question:

• Go to Window->Preferences ...
• From there go to PHP->Editor->Code Assist
• At the bottom is a box called Auto-Activation.

There you can specify the delay it takes for the Code Assist to show up.

I have no solution for your other problem, but perhaps if you wait until 29th of December your problems will be solved by the 2.0 version.

Edit: Not a solution, but perhaps a workaround: Try lowering the prcess priority of your PDT process.

Answer 3

Ive had no hiccups using PDT with Ganymede .. you might want to try (as an experiment) downloading and copying eclipse from the All-in-One Eclipse PDT + Zend Debugger Package zip and see if it runs better?

You can use multiple different eclipses as they don't need any installation and won't interfere with each other - just open and use

Answer 4

It could be the garbage collector. Try a different JVM or a different garbage collection algorithm. It might help you shorten the pause times. With JRockit you can set a pause time target for the garbage collector.

For instance you could set:

-XgcPrio:pausetime 
-XpauseTarget:250

in you eclipse.ini file. See this blog for some information on how you can set up Eclipse to run on JRockit

Answer 5

There is another project for adding PHP support to Eclipse: PHPeclipse. I know that when PDT was still young, people often choose PHPeclipse because of performance problems with PDT, but I cannot say, how the current versions of both compare with respect to performance (and features), as I quit my PHPeclipse development activities quite some time ago.

If your performance problem is a real show stopper, you might want to give PHPeclipse a try.

Answer 6

you could try this:

Selec Project => clean from menu and select all php projects. This could take a while ( if you have many/large projects ), but then it should get faster.

For an alternate free IDE you could try NetBeans. From version 6.5 it has full php support, and for me it's faster than Eclipse+PDT, and more stable / memory consupting.

Answer 7

I have just migrated to a new powerful machine an downloaded the latest 2.2 PDT (based on Helios). There occured performance issues with PDT on my old machine and wondering I still have issues.

Auto Complete is completely disabled and PDT has still hicups (Eclipse ist completely hanging for 1-3 seconds) now and then. Are there any new ideas to increase the performance beside switching to JRockit? Much larger Java projects on a "normal" eclipse run smoothly, thus I cannot believe that one must switch the JVM for a smooth PDT?!