Speed up your eclipse as a super fast IDE

http://www.beyondlinux.com/blog/?p=93

by davideuler • 15 years ago

66 46 15 years ago

d0m• 15 years ago

Anyone using Eclipse can confirm that? I've moved away from that IDE for years because how slow it was. (Also because it was so damn hard to configure it the way I wanted)

I remember though putting somewhat similar in my config file.

dekz• 15 years ago

The most notable change is probably the RAM disk, anyone with an SSD would be able to agree that eclipse is fast (more usable) when running on a drive with an SSD. All that compile on the fly as you're typing would be quite IO bound.

I use eclipse at work on a spinning disk and at home on an SSD, using the SSD makes an incredible difference.

pan69• 15 years ago

I'm running Eclipse on Ubuntu (x64) on OpenJDK and it works fine. My hardware isn't particularly fast either. I might reboot one a week or so. I do have 8GB of memory though.

bad_user• 15 years ago

For some reason, on Ubuntu x86, Eclipse is really slow for me.

IntelliJ Idea is much better. And now the community edition comes with capabilities for Android projects.

I recommend it instead of Eclipse.

ashr• 15 years ago

Yes. With the eclipse.ini changes alone mine starts in 6 seconds now instead of 30+ seconds. Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU, 4 GB DDR3 RAM.

kleiba• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, what are you using now?

davideuler3• 15 years ago

On my Aspire 4745G laptop with 4g ram windows 7 x64, it is fairy slow to run eclipse x64 with jdk x64. So I adjusted the vm arguments and some eclipse setting mentioned above, and found it runs super fast after the change.

If it works or does not work on your machine, or any other smart way to speed up your eclipse, pls let me know.

elb0w• 15 years ago

or use vim

wisty2• 15 years ago

Vim doesn't compile as you type, so it can't give you much intelligent interaction with your code.

Obviously, there are work-arounds (like using clean APIs and libraries), but that's not always an option.

dsl• 15 years ago

Good programmers don't need this.

primitur3• 15 years ago

>intelligent interaction with your code.

I use cscope for intelligent interaction with my code, vim as the primary editor/interface (keybindings for cscope are awesome..) and ddd in an 'always on top' window for building/debugging .. in comparison to my Eclipse (android) environment where I am also working, I think that an easy balance can be made if you use the 'apps as pipes' philosophy that a good vim experience requires ..

devinfoley• 15 years ago

I use vim for everything but Java. When it's Java time, I use Eclipse. In fact, if every language worked as well in Eclipse as Java does, I'd probably use Eclipse for everything (like I used to). The productivity gains you get from using Eclipse for Java vs a text editor (vim) are HUGE. This is not a fault of vim, it's a fault of Java for being so verbose.

Example: you can move a method to a new class in Java, and Eclipse will go through your entire project and find all references to that method and update them for you.

I guess it's the same reason C# and MS coders love Visual Studio so much.

That said, I try to avoid using Java, and generally stick to vim.

chillax2• 15 years ago

But wouldn't you apply some of those refactorings in other languages too? Movings methods, refactoring out inner classes, removing/adding parameters to methods and constructors etc. It all adds up if the language has good support in your IDE.

I'm not a power user of vim, but perhaps there are some kind of extensions for some of these things there?

bgrohman• 15 years ago

Have you seen Eclim?

http://eclim.org/

You can either 1) run a headless eclipse with a vim front end, 2) use a headed eclipse and vim together, or 3) use a headed eclipse with gvim as an embedded editor.

Looks like it might be worth a try.

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

The best recommendation is to make sure you're using the Sun JDK and not the GCC-GCJ. That alone will constitute a large speed up. I imagine the ram disk will give basic speed-up. Can't attest to the others though, Eclipse runs more than fast enough here.

baconface• 15 years ago

How does the Sun JDK significantly outperform the GCC-GCJ?

davideuler3• 15 years ago

GCJ is fairy slow.

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

It just does? Try installing Eclipse from the Ubuntu repos, then download it from eclipse.org and run it with the Sun JVM and Sun JDK. Tell me it doesn't scream in comparison.

Locke1689• 15 years ago

What do you mean by this? The gcj JIT is shit compared to the jdk, that's how.

planb• 15 years ago

Short version: Buy an SSD.

zubairov• 15 years ago

Reduce in start time does not automatically mean your IDE will work faster.

vrotaru2• 15 years ago

As for moving jdk instal to ramdisk, on can (ab)use the fact that in Debian/Ubuntu /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun is a symbolic link to /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-${version}/

So create a tmpfs and mount it under /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

    sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=200M,nr_inodes=2k,mode=0775,noatime,nodiratime tmpfs /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
    cd /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
    cp -a /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-${version}/* .

Done. Of course, if you have more than one jdk installed, update-alternatives may be necessary

wr1472• 15 years ago

I couldn't get it to work with the -Xmn128m argument. It wouldn't startup with it in, without it certainly does speed up the startup time.

davideuler3• 15 years ago

curious what's your jdk and eclipse version is ?

hackermom• 15 years ago

From what I can tell, this only speeds up Eclipse' ridiculous start-up time, or am I wrong? This doe~freeze~sn't me~freeze~an that the IDE it~freeze~self will bec~freeze~ome smooth.

vrotaru2• 15 years ago

If it speeds class loading and reduces GC times it should freeze less, as well

nl• 15 years ago

Turn off autobuild.

I find it's much smoother, and Ctrl-S (save), Ctrl-B (build) isn't too much of an overhead over just doing Ctrl-S.

Also, put your code on a SSD.

mattgreenrocks2• 15 years ago

I love Eclipse for Java, but it seems absurd that this page even exists in the first place. I'm OK with a long startup time, but the amount of finagling I had to do in order to get the Android environment to run without hiccuping every 5 minutes is pretty ridiculous. You'd think desktop Java would move to, oh, I don't know, a model where you don't have to set the heap size like we did in Mac OS 7? It just seems archaic to sit there and try to reason how much heap space we'd possibly use ahead of time.

I don't want to care about that, and shouldn't have to.

noduerme• 15 years ago

Some nasty script on this page crashes firefox.

mgkimsal• 15 years ago

I can't seem to find an 'eclipse.ini' file on my system at all. I had eclipse sts and zend studio both installed (both based on eclipse) but "locate eclipse.ini" nets me nothing. Perhaps it's config.ini? Or somewhere else these recommended changes should be made?

shareme• 15 years ago

sts and zend rename it to something *.ini

longlistener• 15 years ago

Gads, its unfortunate that the site hosting this article is so filled with spammy ads -- the full screen intro is acceptable, but the full screen popup is not, and having both is just nuts. I like not using adblock, so site can get some impression revenue, but sites like this continue to make me think adblock is needed.

Speed up your eclipse as a super fast IDE

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