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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know why Eclipse is dog-slow on OS X? crappy JVM implementation or something else.

I had performance issues running on Leopard. Changing to Java 1.6 seemed to improve things.

I finally upgraded to Snow Leopard, and am eager to see if things (with Helios) have improved. I'll post an update later tonight.

Seems pretty fast on my low-end previous-gen mac mini.

How much RAM do you have?

On Linux 32bits and 64bits it is faster than Galileo. (Seems faster and uses less memory)

Has anyone had any issues switching? I just got galileo up and running to my specs. I would hate to change environments for memory benefits and then get bogged down in version minutia.

Not sure which OS you are using, but at least on Windows, different versions of Eclipse can live side-by-side in different directories. So you should be able to test drive a new version without messing up your old version (might want to try setting up a different workspace while experimenting though).

True, I meant compatibility with the existing plugins out there though, Maven, Subversion, PDT+debugger, PyDev, etc. Should have been clearer on that point.

Try increasing the ram limit in eclipse.ini. It's really stupid.

Find eclipse.app

right click and choose Show Package Contents

Contents->MacOS->eclipse.ini

change this line: -Xmx256m to something like -Xmx512m

More memory will help, but just as important is adjusting the garbage collection algorithm and disabling the unnecessarily paranoid class verification that java does:

http://davidsalter.co.uk/blog/?p=332

Here's mine:

-XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:CMSIncrementalMode -XX:CompileThreshold=100 -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled -Xverify:none -Xms1650m -Xmx1650m

Edit: Yeah, 1650m is way more memory than I really need. I'm just fortunate enough to have 8G in this machine so I had plenty to spare.

Edit again: I use emacs in Terminal to edit /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.inito add these parameters

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