How to speed up the eclipse project 'refresh'

Question

I have a fairly large PHP codebase (10k files) that I work with using Eclipse 3.4/PDT 2 on a windows machine, while the files are hosted on a Debian fileserver. I connect via a mapped drive on windows.

Despite having a 1gbit ethernet connection, doing an eclipse project refresh is quite slow. Up to 5 mins. And I am blocked from working while this happens.

This normally wouldn't be such a problem since Eclipse theoretically shouldn't have to do a full refresh very often. However I use the subclipse plugin also which triggers a full refresh each time it completes a switch/update.

My hunch is that the slowest part of the process is eclipse checking the 10k files one by one for changes over samba.

There is a large number of files in the codebase that I would never need to access from eclipse, so I don't need it to check them at all. However I can't figure out how to prevent it from doing so. I have tried marking them 'derived'. This prevents them from being included in the build process etc. But it doesn't seem to speed up the refresh process at all. It seems that Eclipse still checks their changed status.

I've also removed the unneeded folders from PDT's 'build path'. This does speed up the 'building workspace' process but again it doesn't speed up the actual refresh that precedes building (and which is what takes the most time).

Answer 1

Do you have to store the files on a share? Maybe you can set up some sort of automatic mirroring, so you work with the files locally, and they get automatically copied to the share. I'm in a similar situation, and I'd hate to give up the speed of editing files on my own machine.

Answer 2

Given it's subversioned, why not have the files locally, and use a post commit hook to update to the latest version on the dev server after every commit? (or have a specific string in the commit log (eg '##DEPLOY##') when you want to update dev, and only run the update when the post commit hook sees this string).

Apart from refresh speed-ups, the advantage of this technique is that you can have broken files that you are working on in eclipse, and the dev server is still ok (albeit with an older version of the code).

The disadvantage is that you have to do a commit to push your saved files onto the dev server.

Answer 3

Use offline folder feature in Windows by right-click and select "Make availiable offline".

It could save a lot of time and round trip delay in the file sharing protocol.

Answer 4

The use of svn externals with the revision flag for the non changing stuff might prevent subclipse from refreshing those files on update. Then again it might not. Since you'd have to make some changes to the structure of your subversion repository to get it working, I would suggest you do some simple testing before doing it for real.

Answer 5

Thanks all for your suggestions. Basically, JW was on the right track. Work locally.

To that end, I discovered a plugin called FileSync: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/filesync/

This automatically copies the changed files to the network share. Works fantastically. I can now do a complate update/switch/refresh in Eclipse in a couple of seconds.