Eclipse slow on Mac OS X

[andy]

Recently I moved from using a Linux box to running a first gen MacBook
Pro. It seems that running Eclipse on my Mac is significantly slower
than on my Linux machine. Lots of spinning beach balls from time to
time, plus the menus aren't as responsive as they were. Not unusable,
but definitely more sluggish. Anybody notice this? Anybody have an
explantation as to why this would be the case?

In general, in my experience, Eclipse runs fastest on Windows, and
Linux is a little slower, although not by much. Then on the Mac it's
the slowest.

Andy

[Juan Marin]

I do not know about MacOS since I don't hava a Mac (yet) , but I have also experienced worse performance on Linux compared to Windows, and terrible stability on 64 bit based JVMs with Eclipse, it crashes very often. Netbeans works fine, though.

2007/1/26, andy <andyl...@gmail.com>:

--
Juan Marín Otero
Ingeniero de Montes
Consultor SIG

-------Visita mi blog en---------------------
http://programacionsig.blogspot.com
-----------------------------------------------------

[Jon Stockdill]

Did you edit the -Xms -Xmx settings in

<eclipse home>/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini ?

[Jessie]

Eclipse runs pretty well for me on my PowerBook, and NetBeans runs a
lot slower.

I have this in my eclipse.ini file.
-Xms40m
-Xmx256m

What exactly does that do?

[reinierz]

-Xms sets the stack memory size; in this case to 40MB maximum.
-Xmx sets the heap memory size; in this case to 256MB maximum. The
total max you can stuff in here is 1.5GB unless you use 64-bit java,
though be aware that making this number close to or larger than your
system's actual memory will probably slow things down (as swap gets
involved). As a rule, for large apps, moving those numbers up helps a
lot, but 256MB is already high; should be high enough.

Eclipse on my old iBook ran slower than molasses but since I swapped
it for a plain macbook (original Core Duo, not a Core 2 Duo; and this
is the cheapest model macbook as well) eclipse is fast; hardly ever
any beachballs. on an MBP it should be on fire. I don't know what's
going on.

[charlie...@gmail.com]

I had that problem before I added memory to my most recent MacBook
(the default 512 does not cut it with OS X). Lots of beach balls in
Eclipse, etc. Bumping the machine up to 2GB helped. (Regardless of VM
settings.)

Not sure if the situation is the same with the Pro (might have plenty
of memory to begin with), but Apple even offering these things with
less than a gig of RAM is silly, the user experience is just poor
without some RAM horsepower.

[Rick]

> In general, in my experience, Eclipse runs fastest on Windows, and
> Linux is a little slower, although not by much. Then on the Mac it's
> the slowest.
>
> Andy

My experience is that Eclipse runs much much faster on my old G5 Mac
at home than at work on Windows XP.

But then even without doing anything, Eclipse takes 139 meg of real
ram, and 765 meg of virtual ram, and it is also running some kind of
background service taking 6 meg of real ram and another 202 meg of
virtual ram.

For a grand total of 145 megs real ram, 0.95 gigs of virtual ram.

What I find exceedingly annoying about Eclipse is that not only does
it not do anything useful out of the box, but if you copy someone
else's install it won't work either.

For some bizarre reason we have to put it all together ourselves in
order to do anything minimally useful*.

Netbeans is no great shakes, but at least I can install Netbeans and
immediately start writing web apps. Whereas with Eclipse it can take
days to get it set up. So very frustrating.

*Over and above what I get from Wordpad and Javac on the command line,
which is about all Eclipse does out of the box.

[Jesse Eichar]

I would recommend making your workspace, your project(s) and the
eclipse directories to be added to the Privacy tab of the spotlight
system preferences so that spotlight isn't trying to index your build
files.

Jesse

[Dave Patterson]

For me it's worth sacrificing all those resources for the syntax
highlighting and code completion alone.

Sure, the base eclipse install is just an editor but I can't imagine
life without it now. I use the type and reference search so much I
started to give myself a hand strain. (My solution - pop the left
control key off the keyboard. It forces you to use two hands.)

Re the install grief - I've never had problems. We tend to run the
regular installer and then share projects via SVN rather than copying
a pre-installed version.

Dave Patterson.

On Jan 28, 9:59 am, "Rick" <rickcar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > In general, in my experience, Eclipse runs fastest on Windows, and
> > Linux is a little slower, although not by much. Then on the Mac it's
> > the slowest.
>

> > AndyMy experience is that Eclipse runs much much faster on my old G5 Mac

[harald.walker]

Andy, you could give us a bit more information, like amount of memory,
Eclipse version,...

On Jan 26, 6:15 pm, "andy" <andyliu1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Anybody notice this?

Am using Eclipse 3.2 on an 20" iMac with Intel inside (one of the
first last year), 2GB of RAM. The 2GB are not really needed but it is
a good investment if you also want to run Windows in a WM (for testing
your work on that IE browser which too many people still use).

I don't have any speed problems, in contrary. When I am working at
home on my good old G4 PowerBook I realize how fast those new Intel
Macs can be.

Did you change your Eclipse settings as suggested? Before I did that I
often got out of memory errors.

[joel.neely]

My experience has been much better than you describe.

I've been using Eclipse since 2.x, now at 3.2. When I upgraded from a
PBG4 to a MBP, Java performance (on a Q&D compute-intensive benchmark)
went up by a factor of 6. Running the same code on my desk box at
work (reasonable mid-range WXP box with lots of memory) showed my MBP
faster by about a factor of 2.

I've done no tweaking of Eclipse startup on any of my environments.