Jeff Dillon

     
 
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25 Jun · Fri 2004

I had to Dump Eclipse
I have used Eclipse for almost three years for my Java development. I also got my previous company to adopt it as the standard Java IDE since I really liked it. However, I recently had to dump it. It simply has become too bloated and is unable to handle projects with a very large number of files. The project I am working on at Sun simply has many more files than previous projects and Eclipse continued to crash and hang. (I was using the latest Eclipse 2 and Eclipse 3.0 is not any better.) As a software developer, I have absolutely no patience to wait for simple tasks like opening files and restarting from hangs and crashes.

I have been using IntelliJ for about two weeks now. The first test that it sucessfully passed was being able to handle the massive number of files in my project very easily. IntelliJ also has a few features that were not in Eclipse until very recently (3.0). I am also going to try out NetBeans since it has been about a year since I looked at it.
@ 10:45 AM PDT
 
 
 
 
Comments:

Give NB 3.6 a try. It's a big improvement over previous versions. Also, have you tried Sun Studio?

Posted by Jeremy Week on June 25, 2004 at 12:45 PM PDT #

Netbeans is interesting but I still think IDEA blows it out of the water. The refactoring stuff in IDEA is simply superb. The interface is as well. Very well thought-out application.

Posted by Jason Kratz on June 25, 2004 at 02:30 PM PDT #

If you really had a problem, why did you not add a bug entry? They fix these things....

Posted by Jon on June 25, 2004 at 02:46 PM PDT #

I'd like to know how many files you have to deal with in that very large project. Thanx.

Posted by Moritz Petersen on June 26, 2004 at 12:03 AM PDT #

Wow, man ! You must be working on a huge project down there. Just to put things into perspective, my workspace has now 375megs in >22000 files (among which 5792 are Java sources). And Eclipse is running ok ... I imagine what kind of monster you must be dealing with ! Have you tried deleting the indexation cache and local history for projects in Eclipse ? I am kinda amazed that IDEA is coping better with massive quantities of sources, I had a quite bad experience back in their v2 days. Think I'll download their latest EAP and play a little bit :)

Posted by Adrian on June 26, 2004 at 12:50 AM PDT #

There are approximately 8500 files. I was suprised to hear about 22,000 files "running ok". I had upped the eclipse JRE heap size to 250 MB just to make it able to compile, and it felt like all it was doing was thrashing. Maybe there was another probem. Actually, after using IntelliJ, I realized that all I really want is a really smart java text editor. I'll still give Java Studio Creator and Netbeans a try though.

Posted by Jeff Dillon on June 26, 2004 at 10:03 AM PDT #

In Eclipse, be sure to activate incremental compilation. Avoid useless plugins which might add slow project builders (PMD, metrics, etc.). Keep opened only the modules you're working on. Periodically clean the local history and indexes (or deactivate local history). Clean the Eclipse log from time to time. If your system does not have a lot of memory, keep the heap size at a bearable minimum since swapping is worse than garbage collection; and use the concurrent garbage collector. Never ever put your workspace on a remote system, shared via samba/nfs/whatever. be patient when you compile the first time. What can I say ? It works for us...

Posted by Adrian on June 26, 2004 at 01:35 PM PDT #

The largest slow down in Eclipse is a high number of open files. Check out Preferences -> Workbench -> Editors. I set "Number of opened editors before closing" to 8 (higher is fine too); Eclipse has been quite zippy ever since. "Close all editors on exit" can also be useful. After awhile things get out of control if nothing is closing those editors.

Posted by Tobias on July 08, 2004 at 12:52 PM PDT #

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