Tweaking Eclipse

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:30:00 -0500

I finally got fed up yesterday with the slow speed at which Eclipse was launching on my Windows box. On my Linux box, it doesn't take that long to launch (may five or six seconds) compared to my Windows box (around 15 - 20 seconds). I know I have a lot of plugins, but it was getting a little ridiculous. I started poking around and I noticed in the configuration details (Help / About Eclipse SDK / Configuration Details) that the vm that was launching was 1.4. Ok, so there's one problem. I also noticed that the max memory setting was 256MB (-Xmx256M). Since this box has 2GB of RAM, I figured 256MB is a little on the low side (and note, mucking around with the heap sizes won't help load times). The first thing I did was change the shorcut target for Eclipse to be


C:\eclipse\eclipse.exe -vm "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_08\bin\javaw.exe"

Now I'm sure that Eclipse will launch with Java 5 and (hopefully) speed things up a bit. Double-click on the short-cut, and sure enough, we're down to about 8 seconds. The next thing I wanted to do is increase the default min and max memory settings. In c:\eclipse\eclipse.ini, you'll see


-vmargs
-Xms40M
-Xmx256M

I changed these to


-vmargs
-Xms256m
-Xmx768m

This increases the minimum memory space to 256M and the maximum to 768M. You can also do this by adding these vmargs to the shortcut target:


C:\eclipse\eclipse.exe -vm "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_08\bin\javaw.exe" -vmargs -Xms256M -Xmx768M

If you have a multi-processor computer (and I believe this includes dual-core systems, though I haven't read the docs on this), you can use some of the new VM ergonomics to self-tune garbage collection by adding this switch:


-XX:+UseParallelGC

One last handy parameter is "-showlocation" which shows the current location of your workspace. If you have different workspaces, this is handy. If you want to read more about some JVM garbage collection (and who doesn't) here are some helpful links:

Java SE HotSpot at a Glance
Garbage Collector Ergonomics
Tuning Garbage Collection with the 5.0 Java Virtual Machine
Java Performance Documentation
A Collection of JVM Options (check out the references at the bottom of the page)

SFTP for Eclipse

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 10:59:00 -0500

One of my gripes with Eclipse platform has been lack of support for a (functional) SFTP plugin. I had tried about a year ago, but came up empty with something that would work. I gave it another go last week and found ESftp . It took a couple of tries to get it working (more on that in a second), but once I did, I've been finding it really useful. What I really have liked is the ability to configure the plugin at the project and folder levels (in case you need to send them in different places). The one sticky-point I found in getting it up and running was the fact that the plugin has dependencies on the JSSH2 and Jsch which are not packaged directly with the extension. The author gives a reason in the README file, but like most folks, I just plugged the extension into Eclipse and expected it to work since there's no mention of it on their website. Anyway, here are the brief directions to getting this working...

Download both the esftp and esftp-lib files
Extract the esftp.zip somewhere convenient (it automatically creates a directory named "plugins/org.kmem.kosk.sftp_<version>")
Extract esftp-lib.zip into the same directory above so the /lib folder is inside of plugins/org.kmem.kosk.sftp_<version>
Move the entire org.kmem.kos.sftp_<version> into $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins
Run Eclipse with the clean command line option eclipse -clean

You should then have a new menu bar named ESftp. To configure your global settings, go to Window/Preferences.../ESftp. To configure a project, right click on the root folder and select Properties. For an individual folder, again, right-click and select Properties. After you've gotten everything configured the way you want, just the the contextual ESftp Get File, Put + Save File, and Put File actions to transfer items back and forth. Another (similar) project I found was deployer. I haven't played with that particular plugin as the per-folder settings in ESftp were more of what I was looking for. The one thing I still would love is an ANT task to SFTP...the only downside is that there has to be a password in clear text somewhere. If you want to give this a whirl, and are having a problem getting the plugin to work, drop me a line and I'll send you the entire (presumably) working plugin.

Wayne Graham's Blog - Eclipse

Tweaking Eclipse

SFTP for Eclipse