Question

My eclipse runs horribly slow because I have thousands of plugins installed on it. I spoke with another friend who uses eclipse but he has none. I feel like none of these are necessary and I didn’t even install so many. I have thousands of plugins and I tried reinstaling eclipse but I need to find a way to remove every single eclipse plugin.

Attempting to delete a plugin manually takes up to 5 minutes per plugin, so it could take me months or years before actually deleting all of these by hand.

Is there a feature in eclipse to delete all the plugins? Also I’m using WINDOWS XP

Answer 1

First, you need to understand that virtually everything in Eclipse is a plugin. Eclipse has a very small core runtime (Equinox) that loads all features from plugins. You can’t just “delete every plugin” as doing so would leave you with nothing.

Also, just because a plugin is installed does not mean that it is always loaded or taking up resources. Eclipse uses a “lazy loading” architecture that will only load a plugin when some feature that it provides is actually invoked. Some plugins are probably written poorly in such a way that they are loaded too aggressively, but that would be the rare exception. So, in general, having lots of plugins is not a problem for performance.

If you do have a plugin that you want to remove, you can not just delete it from the plugins folder – as you’ve seen that will screw up your Eclipse installation. Don’t do that.

One way to manage the features that you have installed, including installing ones that are able to be uninstalled, is to open the About dialog, then click the Installation Details button. There you’ll be presented with a list of features that have been installed; you can select a feature and if it’s possible to uninstall it the Uninstall… button will be enabled.

Often it’s one bad third-party plugin/feature (not something from eclipse.org) that causes an Eclipse installation to have problems; try to find what it might be by process of elimination (uninstall all third-party plugins that you might have installed since your Eclipse was fresh).

Finally, as a last resort, it is trivial to remove Eclipse completely (just delete it from your file system) and re-install it fresh.

Having said all that, performance problems are usually due to an underpowered machine. What kind of processort do you have? How much RAM does your system have available after Windows boots up? Have you specified memory settings in eclipse.ini?