Using the Android SDK on a Mac, Eclipse is really slow. How can I speed it up?

Question

I'm using Eclipse + the Android SDK on a Mac running Snow Leopard to develop Android apps.

Thing is, Eclipse is really slow - like, it "beach balls" for a few seconds when changing tabs.

Is there anything I can do to improve it's performance?

Solution 1

The solution: change the Java version used and increase the allocated memory.

Edit eclipse.ini - this file is located Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini.

Change the following vars to use Java 1.6 and allocate more memory:

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion = 1.6
-Xms128m
-Xmx1024m

(Found originally here: http://www.codeweblog.com/eclipse-adt-mac-version-tab-to-switch-slow-solution/)

Solution 2

You can try some suggestions from this IBM developerWorks article

Search for the "Maximizing Eclipse performance on Mac OS X" section

Solution 3

Switching from the 64-bit to the 32-bit version of Eclipse made a big improvement to UI responsiveness for me. Try Eclipse Classic 4.2 32-bit from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads. I'm using the "Java 6 SE (System) 32-bit" JVM in OS X 10.8.1.

Tab switching, opening context menus, and opening java files went from sometimes over a second to nearly instant after this change.

I've tried a lot of suggestions over the past few months, including upgrading from 2 to 6 GB RAM, upgrading to an SSD, -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6, setting various maximum heap sizes from 1 to 4 GB, various 64-bit JVM's - Apple's Java 6 SE, Java SE 7, Java SE 8, and none of these fixed the stalling problem.

Solution 4

I've been running Eclipse under a virtual machine. I've found VMWare to provide the best performance, but VirtualBox is the only one that consistently displays WebGL correctly in the browser (if that is important to you).

For the record, a virtual machine running Windows or Linux yields better Eclipse performance than running Eclipse on OSX. I've tried all of those settings and the tab switching speed is just too slow. I did some timings and it's just not something I can work with as it drives me absolutely crazy.

Configuration:

• OSX 10.7.5
• 4GB Ram
• 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo

View more solutions

Comments

[abhijeet nigoskar]

definitely deserve the +1...btw impressing app (Cube)

[Aleks N.]

Unfortunately this doesn't actually help. I did all the recommended things but it is still tremendously slow. I'm thinking to switch to a text-editor and a terminal.

[Admin]

This did not help me, either. Does this still work for you morais or have you had to make any other changes?

[morais]

Yes, this is still fast enough for me, even using the latest Gingerbread SDK

[Admin]

Hmm, it is fast again. The only change I did was disabling automatic build. Maybe that is the magic.

[Timmmm]

The requiredJavaVersion = 1.6 makes a big difference. I was getting frustrated with Eclipse and went back and checked the .ini and noticed I have both requiredJavaVersion = 1.6 and requiredJavaVersion = 1.5. Make sure you remove the 1.5!