Speed up your eclipse

Speed up your eclipse as a super fast IDE

Posted on  June 25, 2011  by  euler

Follow these steps to speed up your eclipse as a super fast IDE , it works for 32 & 64 bit version eclipse/jdk on my windows 7 x64.

1.Disable antivirus software, or add your jdk & eclipse & workspace & other related folder to white list in your antivirus software.

2.Disable unecessary validations and startup action in eclipse reference.

For validations: on eclipse menu Windows -> Preferences -> Validation, click “Disable All”, and then select the validator which you need. I selected “Classpath Dependency Validator” only.

For startup action: on eclipse menu Windows -> Preferences, type “startup”, select “Startup and Shutdown”, untick the options you don’t need. (Thanks for David’s suggest,  I’ve added the above 2 detail steps for readers)

3.Modify eclipse.ini to set the Xmn(new generation size), Xms and Xmx, enable parallel GC
-vm
C:/jdk1.6.0_25/bin
-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar
–launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_64_1.1.100.v20110502
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.jee.product
–launcher.defaultAction
openFile
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
–launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-vmargs
-server
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xmn128m
-Xms1024m
-Xmx1024m
-Xss2m
-XX:PermSize=128m
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m
-XX:+UseParallelGC

4.Create a ram disk(virtual disk) on memory, and put your jdk on the ram disk.
You can use imdisk to create ram disk. Firstly download it from: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk,  and install it.

Then set the ImDisk driver to auto-load at Command Prompt with administrative privileges (for example right-click, start as Administrator), type:

sc config imdisk start= auto
net start imdisk

create a 200m ram disk as driver n by:
imdisk -a -t vm -s 300m -m n:

then you should format the ram disk manually.

later ,if you would like to remove the ram disk, just run the command:
imdisk -D -m n:

5.Make sure you are using sun jdk, not open jdk/gcj nor other jdk on linux.
If you are not satified with the after the above steps, install jrockit instead of sun jdk, and change some of the vm options by jrocket specification,
jrockit is faster than sun jdk.

Some note:

On my laptop(Aspire 4745G 4G mem ), windows 7 x64, by default, it takes more than 30 seconds to start eclipse.  After the vm options tuned,  takes only 15 seconds.

And after jdk moved to ram disk, it takes 10 seconds to startup.