Paul Vodra's Blog

Eclipse is great, but it takes a while to get started on my work laptop. I decided to search around to see what I could do to speed it up.

The first tip I found was to make sure you were running Eclipse under the most recent JDK. By default Eclipse uses the first JVM it finds in your path. The server components on this project require Java 5, not 6, so many developers have to configure their systems to allow Maven to use Java 5. They can still install Java 6 and use it with Eclipse with the following argument:

-vm "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_22\bin\javaw.exe"

You can either put that in the shortcut you use to start Eclipse, or you can put it in the Eclipse.ini file.

The second tip is to disable unnecessary plug-ins on startup. In Eclipse 3.6 (Helios) this is configurable in Preferences -> General -> Startup and Shutdown. I don’t think a lot of people use Mylyn, so that’s a feature to disable if you don’t.

The third tip is to customize the eclipse.ini file. I found this great post on StackOverflow that explains the best options for entries in eclipse.ini for any recent version of Eclipse you are using.

For an in-depth look at all the Eclipse runtime options, check out the Eclipse documentation.