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?

Did you notice that your profile photo matches the subject of your post perfectly? ;-) — Adrian Grigore, May 07 '10 at 08:15
I have tried a lot of tweaks on the eclipse.ini file but I still find Eclipse too slow. Hope you find a good solution! — Jan S., May 08 '10 at 16:17

score 63 · Accepted Answer · answered May 07 '10 at 08:00

63

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/)

answered May 07 '10 at 08:00

morais

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definitely deserve the +1...btw impressing app (Cube) – Juri Aug 01 '10 at 16:42
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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. – Aleks N. Sep 08 '10 at 15:01
This did not help me, either. Does this still work for you morais or have you had to make any other changes? – Nov 28 '10 at 23:41
Yes, this is still fast enough for me, even using the latest Gingerbread SDK – morais Dec 21 '10 at 14:49
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Hmm, it is fast again. The only change I did was disabling automatic build. Maybe that is the magic. – Dec 21 '10 at 22:21
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`! – Timmmm Oct 24 '12 at 17:30

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered May 07 '10 at 08:03

4

You can try some suggestions from this IBM developerWorks article

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

answered May 07 '10 at 08:03

Prashast

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 20 '12 at 16:48

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.

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 12 '12 at 06:41

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

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

4 Answers4

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