How do I speed up Eclipse Juno?

Question

After updating to Eclipse Juno I found that it intermittently freezes when I change views. It also becomes slow. Adjusting the Heap size does not have any positive effect on the performance.

How do I improve the performance of Eclipse?

Solution 1

UPDATE : New performance release(SP2) for Eclipse Juno is out. So if your Eclipse Juno(4.2) is too slow or if it crashes intermittently it can be updated to SP2.

Just goto Help -> Check for Updates

P.S. Please backup your Eclipse folder before doing this.

ORIGNAL ANSWER:

This is a known issue in Eclipse Juno and there is a patch released for that. Installing this fixes the performance issues -

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Platform_UI/Juno_Performance_Investigation

Quote

Several major performance defects have been addressed in the Juno SR2 stream (4.2.2). Community members have confirmed that these fixes substantially address the performance problems with editor and view opening, closing, and switching. These fixes will be widely available in the Juno Service Release 2 (February 2013) and Kepler (June 2013) releases. Meanwhile, a patch is available for those using Juno SR1 that provides early access to these fixes. To install this patch:

Ensure you are already running on a package from the Juno SR1 release (September 2012) Invoke Help > Install New Software Select this repository: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.2 Expand Juno SR1 Patches and install Eclipse UI Juno SR1 Optimizations To repeat, this patch is only intended for users of the Juno SR1 release. If you have a Juno SR2 maintenance build from November 21 or later, or Kepler stream milestone M4 or later, this patch is not required.

Solution 2

Upgrading to Eclipse Kepler 4.3 is a no brainer, it's much faster than the Juno release because the Eclipse team has indeed fixed the performance defects. I personally ended up installing my entire development environment including the JDK and Eclipse on a RAM drive.

Eclipse now starts in under 10 seconds and overall performance has improved dramatically. I documented my approach here:

http://www.whizu.org/articles/how-to-install-eclipse-on-a-ramdrive.whizu

Comments

[duvo]

i don't see Juno SR1 patches in the repository. I'm currently running Juno SR1

[Pushkar]

@duvo : Updated my answer with latest steps.

[Paul Verest]

Kepler is to be much faster. What's new docs reference speed improvements.