Question

message.setText(reader.name()),

I am currently working with an old laptop with only 3GB RAM, and constantly facing memory shortage.

I followed some advice to force garbage collector & disabling some plugins, and my Eclipse (Springsource tool suite actually) heap status is showing around ~400M/~600M. But in task manager the 2 javaw.exe processes (tomcat and STS) are consuming 900mb & 700mb.

The physical memory is steadily at 80%~90% and it’s running very slowly.

I’m using windows 7 32-bit, so the problem with Java using more memory on 64-bit should not apply here I think.

Does message.setText(reader.name()) know anyway to reduce the memory usage? I don’t mind disabling Eclipse’s features at all, heck I can even code on black screen white text if it make the laptop run faster.

Answer 1

In a performance tuning exercise you have to look at the whole machine:

1. Check the task manager’s process list to see if there are any other memory/cpu hogs. There are some email clients that take up a lot of both memory and CPU.
2. Check your network connection. Both Eclipse and Tomcat (Tomcat less so) have processes that check remote URLs for schemas, etc. and if you have a poor internet connection (or none at all) the remote requests and/or timeouts can slow you down.
3. As @jdevelop points out you can reduce the memory allocated to both Eclipse and Tomcat, but understand that if they need more memory than you give them that you’ll be doing a bunch of disk i/o to compensate
4. Finally, do check into what extra plugins you have loaded into Eclipse to see if there’s anything you can disable for now. Other plugins by default do a lot of work under the covers (e.g. the resources.core plugin will store off a lot of history) and maybe by configuring them to do less work you’ll free up your machine to do more interesting stuff.