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I am just curious why it takes so long to switch workspaces in Eclipse. It is annoying that the process takes so long.

Tyler W.
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    @GREnvoy Have you heard the word about our Lord and Savior? This is not an appropriate place to recommend an entirely different tool, which tends to lead towards a "religious" debate about which IDE is "better" or "right". – Mar Nov 19 '15 at 21:45
  • He's asking why it takes so long, I'm asking if it's possible that a faster tool would server his purposes while alleviating his problem. Alleluia! – Brian S Nov 19 '15 at 21:49
  • Do you really need to switch workspaces? You can run a separate copy of eclipse for each workspace at the same time, if your PC has the resources for it. – Kenster Nov 19 '15 at 22:25
  • @Kenster I appreciate the suggestion, I will try that next time. @ Martin Carney Thanks, I cannot actually install any other IDE at school, I was just curious why it took so long. – Tyler W. Nov 23 '15 at 01:37

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Each workspace contains a whole slew of preferences and metadata, in addition to the projects in the folder. When you change workspaces, Eclipse must reload and apply all those settings, open the projects which are "open", and so forth. There are some things that aren't reloaded, but the biggest contributors are reloaded because they need to be reloaded.

If you have a lot of projects in a workspace, you can cut down on the loading time by closing any large projects you don't touch very often. In "Package Explorer" or "Project Explorer" views, right-click the project, and choose "Close Project" from the context menu. This basically tells Eclipse that it doesn't need information on/from those project in memory at any given moment.

Mar
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    And when @Martin says a whole slew, it's easily 30MB+, I've seen it grow well into the hundreds of MB. There are a number of threads that offer suggestions to improve the load time if you desire. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/316265/how-can-you-speed-up-eclipse – Brian S Nov 19 '15 at 21:54
  • @GREnvoy Indeed. My `.metadata` folder is 93MB plus 5M for `.recommenders`. – Mar Nov 19 '15 at 21:56
  • For me this is part of the religious experience that is IntelliJ, there is minimal data to load. – Brian S Nov 19 '15 at 21:59
  • Thank you for all of the helpful responses! – Tyler W. Nov 23 '15 at 01:36