Recently, eclipse has released the core ide development code named Ganymede. I had tried the changes and feel badly in performance experience (My office PC is little bit old).  So I need to tune up the eclipse engine so it can start and run smoothly during my work. Here is the few step to increase the performance in Eclipse.

Adding garbage collector option and memory capacity.
In eclipse.ini file under eclipse home directory, please add the following lines before next time starting eclipse

…
-vmargs
…
-Xms128m
-Xmx256m
-XX:+UseParallelGC
…

The first two items, -Xms128 and -Xmx256m indicate eclipse to start up with the minimun memory = 128 mb and maximun memory = 256 mb. This will reserve a heap to eclipse and avoid eclipse to memory leak in case of a big project assigned.

-XX:+UseParallelGC force the garbace collector to reclaim the memory in parallel. The parallel method will reduce the “Stop The World” pause time slightly.

Turn off some inessential options in Eclipse preference.
1. Uncheck “Enable Capture” option in Usage data collector menu under Eclipse Perferences.
2. In validation menu, again in preference. Please tun on “suspend all validators” option.
3. Ignore the spell checking features by check out “enable spell checking” option in preference/editors/text editors/spellings.
4. Not allow eclipse to build package automatically in eclipse menu -> project->build automatically.

PS. Some features are available in 3.4 eclipse. For the previous used in Europa 3.3–, you can set tune a part of feature without the whole steps.

There are two plugins I would like to suggest to an eclipse developer. All of them are about to manage the memory. As we know Java problem is most relevent to the memory so the first choice to tune java application is to take action in memory management. Eclipse is Java application!

KeepResident
To be honestly, windows is really bias for java application that runs inside. It often swap out the memory belongs to java process eventhough there are lots of physical memory available.

KeepResident is eclipse plugin that interacts to the window memory manager. It will sends the message via window api to reserve more physical memory to eclipse as flush out the memory as necessary.

KeepResident plugin is available in SUIF group of standford. You can get it directly via the plugin page as below in download menu,
http://suif.stanford.edu/pub/keepresident/index.html

After downloading, please extract it into /plugins folder under eclipse home directory. Once you install, go to preference page then adjust the minimum/maximun value as desire.

For the VirtualLock option. It will force the eclipse always in the physical memory eventhough it is minimize in the the taskbar. Aware of window always flushes the memory if the application is out from the space. Anyway, VirtualLock option is really unstable. It’s on your own risk to use.

The result we get after re-adjust memory for eclipse.

The SUIF mentions that it works with Eclipse 3.0 and 2.1 version. By the way I did install and test with Ganymede 3.4, it also works well.

MemoryManager
Another IBM’s tool. This is most effective to adjust garbage collector work in eclipse itself memory handle. The plugin works at startup to find the free memory after GC starts. It will monitor memory usage every few seconds and do garbage collect with the effective algorithm to recover memory if it goes down below 75% of free memory.

The plugin is available here,
http://www.cloudgarden.com/memorymanager/

To turn on the graphical view of the current memory. Please choosing -> Windows->View-> Other->MemoryManager->Memory in main menu. The view states about free/total/max memory in megabyte. We can also force GC to run immediatly via a shortcut.