Question

I am working on a fairly large project and have recently bumped into the good old friend of mine from the 90’s, typing lag.
My setup is MacBook Pro 2.2 GHz i7 8GB with SSD drive and it hasn’t had any serious performance issues so far.

I have increased the memory allocations to -Xmx1024m and –XX:MaxPermSize=512m. There is no heavy use of plugins involved. Also, this only happens on .java files in the default editor.

What could be the problem?

EDIT:
I found the problem. I noticed that the problem occurred only when editing large java files. In my case the class had 1800 rows.

It’s weird though, since I am not facing the same problem with the same eclipse setup on Ubuntu. It seems like Eclipse on Mac just can’t handle java files that big I was editing.

Any suggestions?

EDIT2:

I am using the Eclipse Indigo for Java EE with the latest updates (3.7.1.X)

Installed plugins:

• m2eclipse
• MercurialEclipse aka HGE (1.9.1 from the official eclipse update site)
• Subclipse (installed, but not used in the workspace where the typing lag occurs)
• ADT (installed, but not used in this project)

All plugins are installed via Eclipse marketplace and are updated to the latest release unless stated otherwise.

Answer 1

Jivings was right about the root of the problem being in the eclipse.ini file.

I am not sure what I have actually changed in the eclipse.ini after messing around with the it, since the TimeMachine does not seem to be able to save a backup of the .ini file inside the Eclipse application package (Eclipse/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini).

I actually lowered the MaxPermSize and other memory values which made Eclipse run smoother. If anyone else is encountering the same problem, I suggest you try similar values and see if that works. If it doesn’t, I also read that you can start eclipse once with the -clean argument, which cleans up some installation and usage history among other things. I did not do that, but it’s worth a try.

The following is my current configuration, and it works pretty well:

-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar
--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.1.100.v20110502
-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
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m
-Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts