Every time I start Eclipse it tries to refresh an entire project, which translates to more than 10 minutes of wait time, not to mention the ridiculous amount of memory it would consume.
I know there's a global setting to turn off automatic refreshing (General -> Workspace -> Refresh automatically). Is there a way to turn that off on individual directories? The rationale is that some directories are seldom changed in some of my projects.
Thanks a bunch!
According to this thread, no:
To exclude entire projects, you could close them. Don't know a way for individual directories.
I'm sorry but I don't know anything about such a setting. As one already mentioned you could close the project within Eclipse (once it is open). This prevents the repetitive refreshing on that project. Otherwise I can just give you the suggestion to have 1 workspace per project and not include multiple different projects into the same workspace (unless they are related to each other). This is a much better practice and what I'm doing every day when working with Eclipse. And I didn't experience any problems so far of the type you mentioned.
If your problem is the refresh on startup, try: Preferences -> General -> Startup and Shutdown -> Refresh workspace on startup.
I found an effective hack that can in effect make Eclipse ignore a directory. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/968643/eclipse-ignore-entire-directories/972450#972450
I ran in to this same problem. When an eclipse project refreshes it seems to want to touch every file regardless of settings. The code base I'm working on has ~70K files, and took nearly 2 minutes to refresh. I eventually redefined the eclipse project to be a much smaller subset of that (~10K files) that has a ~ 1 second refresh. Not ideal, but the long refresh times are intolerable.
FYI the "Derived" check box and "Exclude from build..." options DON'T prevent a folder from being refreshed.
Note, the computer I'm using is 4-5 years old (Pentium IV processor, 7200 rpm hard drive). I bet one of these newer fast solid state hard drives would dramatically improve refresh times!