Eclipse indexing takes forever

Question

I have Eclipse Helios SR1 installed on my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop and I'm having to work with a huge set of web projects in it.

When I import the projects eclipse builds the workspace successfully but it keeps consuming 100% of the CPU invariably.

After checking what could be happening I found that in Eclipse's progress tab there is a couple of endless tasks:

• System: Java indexing... n files to index
• System: Updating JSP index
• System: Persisting JSP translations

These tasks seem to never end and makes my Eclipse unusable.

I doubt it is a memory issue, I have 2GB in this machine and Eclipse's heap size does not get greater than 350MB and Xmx is set currently to 1024MB.

Also tried running Eclipse with different VM versions: Sun's 1.6, Sun's 1.5, and Open JDK 1.6. No changes.

I have an Athlon X2 2.2GHz processor and a 7200 rpm Samsung hard drive.

The source code is shared via SVN.

Does anyone have any idea of what could be going on?

This is my eclipse.ini just in case:

-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.gtk.linux.x86_1.1.1.R36x_v20100810
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.jee.product
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Xms40m
-Xmx1024m
-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni

Thanks a lot.

Solution 1

To fix this problem, you have to close Eclipse, delete everything in the folder:

<workspace>.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.dltk.core.index.sql.h2

and restart again.

And then wait a couple of mitutes for the reindexing.

Solution 2

I had the same issue on Ubuntu 10.10 with the SpringSource Tool Suite 2.5.2. This has been reported as Bug 321602.

Just download attachment 180339 and patch your Eclipse.

The official patch will be released in SR2 around end February 2011.

Comments

[Ron]

Here are my baseline eclipse vmargs suggestions: You seem to be on 32 bit, so I advise -server (eclipse is a long running app which can benefit from more thorough JIT). You have left your garbage collector unspecified, so at the very least use -XX:+UseParallelOldGC. You may prefer -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC as it ought to improve interactivity.