Eclipse Performance Tuning Tips

I prefer to run Eclipse with a minimum 1 GB of RAM. I have experienced JVM crashes in the past using Eclipse with MyEclipse, an issue I solved by increasing my min/max setup memory settings (see: Eclipse startup memory settings ).

If you find Eclipse sluggish consider implementing the following tips:

  1. Increase your min/max memory settings (see above link for more info) from 40/256 to 256/512 or higher. You might have to experiment with the min/max setting but increasing the initial memory heap to 128 when Eclipse starts should help.
  2. Disable the code folding feature (e.g., auto-hiding of import statements). Go to Eclipse > Preferences > Java > Editor > Folding and uncheck "Enable Folding" checkbox.
  3. Disable Code Assist Auto-Activation. This means no more code assist popups when you type "." to invoke a list of class method/properties. Go to Eclipse > Preferences > Java > Editor > Code Assist and uncheck Auto-Activation checkbox.
  4. If you are using MyEclipse's plugins you might consider disabling (temporarily until you get more memory) it's many validators Eclipse > Preferences > MyEclipse > Validation. The DTD, HTML, JSP, XML validators all use up memory and can slow the system down.

If you are using a Mac and the Tiger OS see: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=95475