Improving performance of Eclipse/FlexBuilder
May 13th, 2008 . by polygeekI’m working on a Flex project that is just kicking Eclipse in the ass. It takes forever to build and I keep getting out of memory errors. Finally, I complained about the issue on Twitter and @tomcornilliac was nice enough to twit back that I needed to give Eclipse a bigger heap by editing the eclipse.ini file.
Simple enough. My eclipse.ini file is in the root folder of the Eclipse installation and looks like this:
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms40m
-Xmx256m
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
I changed the two bolded lines to:
-Xms256m
-Xmx512m
And everything runs much faster and I haven’t gotten any of those pesky errors since.
You can also go Window > Preferences > General > Show heap status to get a display of how much RAM Eclipse has to work with and how much it’s actually using. Very handy to turn that on to see if you need to increase your RAM allowance.
Here’s a link to a few other suggested performance improvements you can do to Eclipse/FlexBuilder.
You can also BEA JRE (JRockit) with FlexBuilder. I’ve seen a 40% improvement on build time on large projects (300k loc).
Cheers
That said, it only works on Intel CPU.
Why the default memory settings are so low is beyond me.
When you install FDT, it won’t let you switch to the FDT perspective without upping the RAM quotient.
The show heap status check box is a top tip as my poor MacBook can choke on bigger projects.
Jolyon
You could use aggressiveHeap to get the optimal settings, then h/c them. i noticed my example eclipse.ini, aggressiveHeap kinda unstable. http://eclipse.dzone.com/news/turbo-charging-eclipse
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