6 ms·

Kind of surprised by the comments here regarding speed. Have none of you used Eclipse recently on an SSD? I use Jetbrain's stuff a lot of the time, but the bigg

by RyanZAG 11y ago

Kind of surprised by the comments here regarding speed. Have none of you used Eclipse recently on an SSD? I use Jetbrain's stuff a lot of the time, but the biggest problem Jetbrain's stuff has is how terribly slow it is compared to Eclipse. Are these comments just relics of experience from years ago, or is there some secret I'm using in having Eclipse be around 2x the speed of Jetbrains? Just tried opening an Android Java project in both Eclipse and Android Studio and the Eclipse is finished loading before Android Studio is even 20% Other than that, Eclipse is free software which is important in the same way Linux is important to cultivate even though we have Windows.

lchengify 11y ago
So it's never been the SSDs for me, it's always been paging / memory consumption. When I run Eclipse / JetBrains I set the XmX flags super high on the JVM to compensate, but it still always felt slower. Basically I've found that a lot of Eclipse plugins and core pieces associated with the debugger allocate a lot of heap space that never goes away. However I haven't used Eclipse in about 3 years (or on Java 8), or for Android, so if there's something new I'm missing, your point might be valid.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
the_af 11y ago
> Other than that, Eclipse is free software which is important in the same way Linux is important to cultivate even though we have Windows. I fully share your sentiment. The rest of my comment is eclipsed (no pun intended!) by this. That said, SSDs are still not that widely deployed in my country, and almost never in cheap developer laptops. Yes, yes, we can argue all day long about why employers still consider buying good developer machines a needless expense, but meanwhile accept that in many places in the world that is the case. So the question becomes... when the hell did Eclipse decide that in order to work decently you had to use an SSD? Why did its performance degrade so much; what new and revolutionary features did this performance degradation buy us? And why does IntelliJ work so much faster in the same, non-SSD hardware?
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  Never looked at the source code for Eclipse, but I'm guessing it does a lot of parsing and linking on source code and reads the same file multiple times while doing random access to other files. So a decent SSD with good random read speed makes all of that basically instant, while on a slow 5000 rpm laptop hdd it's going to take minutes. In the long run everything will be using SSDs so maybe it won't matter in a couple years? Can see it now: Developer headlines in 2019. "Have you checked out this never before seen IDE called Eclipse? It's blazing fast!"
creshal 11y ago
> Have none of you used Eclipse recently on an SSD? Yes. It's still so slow that I'm faster by using Vim with the javadocs open in a browser window. It's not just disk I/O. CPU overhead and memory consumption are crippling, too.
RandyRanderson 11y ago
Agreed. Ppl have an initial impression that simpler software is faster but once that software gets all the required features (if it ever does) the speed has, in my experience, rarely been as good. I saw the same thing in the early HTC/Samsung smartphone wars. Lots of negative comments/reviews but once you added all the required Sense features via 3rd party apps to comparable Samsung/Google phones the speed was seldom as good. Turns out in that case, it was actually paid astroturfing on samsung's part: http://www.idigitaltimes.com/samsung-fined-340000-fake-htc-reviews-paid-comments-slamming-competitors-revealed-ftc-video-334235 http://www.idigitaltimes.com/samsung-fined-340000-fake-htc-r... Sadly I find the android studio (intellij) spped about the same as elcipse and I don't have any plugins loaded in Android Studio.
glogla 11y ago
There must be some secret. On what OS are you running Eclipse? Do you use OpenJDK or Oracle Java? What version of Eclipse are you using? I'm using Eclipse on work laptop with SSD, and it is soul-crushingly slow, much slower than Idea.
- carterehsmith 11y ago
  Did you bump up the memory (-Xmx) for Eclipse (in eclipse.ini)? Second: Eclipse "edition" matters... like, there is Eclipse for "Java developers" and the one for "J2EE developers, etc". The J2EE edition includes some tooling for Javascript, and that can get completely stuck (CPU at 100%, vents screaming) while trying to deal with large Javascript libraries (say, jQuery). So, try disabling Javascript validation, see if that helps, or just get a Java developer edition. BTW Eclipse support for Javascript is not good at all, so no big loss if you disable it. Next... it used to be that certain antivirus software (McAffee for sure) was slowing down everything big time. Anyways, on a fairly old machine with 8GB RAM, SSD, i7 (4/8) and Oracle JDK and Eclipse 4.4.2. Eclipse works very well. Btw this is on OSX, but some people here use Windows, and it seems to work well on that, too. Hope this helps!

by RyanZAG 11y ago

lchengify 11y ago

So it's never been the SSDs for me, it's always been paging / memory consumption. When I run Eclipse / JetBrains I set the XmX flags super high on the JVM to compensate, but it still always felt slower. Basically I've found that a lot of Eclipse plugins and core pieces associated with the debugger allocate a lot of heap space that never goes away. However I haven't used Eclipse in about 3 years (or on Java 8), or for Android, so if there's something new I'm missing, your point might be valid.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

the_af 11y ago

> Other than that, Eclipse is free software which is important in the same way Linux is important to cultivate even though we have Windows. I fully share your sentiment. The rest of my comment is eclipsed (no pun intended!) by this. That said, SSDs are still not that widely deployed in my country, and almost never in cheap developer laptops. Yes, yes, we can argue all day long about why employers still consider buying good developer machines a needless expense, but meanwhile accept that in many places in the world that is the case. So the question becomes... when the hell did Eclipse decide that in order to work decently you had to use an SSD? Why did its performance degrade so much; what new and revolutionary features did this performance degradation buy us? And why does IntelliJ work so much faster in the same, non-SSD hardware?

RyanZAG 11y ago
Never looked at the source code for Eclipse, but I'm guessing it does a lot of parsing and linking on source code and reads the same file multiple times while doing random access to other files. So a decent SSD with good random read speed makes all of that basically instant, while on a slow 5000 rpm laptop hdd it's going to take minutes. In the long run everything will be using SSDs so maybe it won't matter in a couple years? Can see it now: Developer headlines in 2019. "Have you checked out this never before seen IDE called Eclipse? It's blazing fast!"

creshal 11y ago

> Have none of you used Eclipse recently on an SSD? Yes. It's still so slow that I'm faster by using Vim with the javadocs open in a browser window. It's not just disk I/O. CPU overhead and memory consumption are crippling, too.

RandyRanderson 11y ago

Agreed. Ppl have an initial impression that simpler software is faster but once that software gets all the required features (if it ever does) the speed has, in my experience, rarely been as good. I saw the same thing in the early HTC/Samsung smartphone wars. Lots of negative comments/reviews but once you added all the required Sense features via 3rd party apps to comparable Samsung/Google phones the speed was seldom as good. Turns out in that case, it was actually paid astroturfing on samsung's part: http://www.idigitaltimes.com/samsung-fined-340000-fake-htc-reviews-paid-comments-slamming-competitors-revealed-ftc-video-334235 http://www.idigitaltimes.com/samsung-fined-340000-fake-htc-r... Sadly I find the android studio (intellij) spped about the same as elcipse and I don't have any plugins loaded in Android Studio.

glogla 11y ago

There must be some secret. On what OS are you running Eclipse? Do you use OpenJDK or Oracle Java? What version of Eclipse are you using? I'm using Eclipse on work laptop with SSD, and it is soul-crushingly slow, much slower than Idea.

carterehsmith 11y ago
Did you bump up the memory (-Xmx) for Eclipse (in eclipse.ini)? Second: Eclipse "edition" matters... like, there is Eclipse for "Java developers" and the one for "J2EE developers, etc". The J2EE edition includes some tooling for Javascript, and that can get completely stuck (CPU at 100%, vents screaming) while trying to deal with large Javascript libraries (say, jQuery). So, try disabling Javascript validation, see if that helps, or just get a Java developer edition. BTW Eclipse support for Javascript is not good at all, so no big loss if you disable it. Next... it used to be that certain antivirus software (McAffee for sure) was slowing down everything big time. Anyways, on a fairly old machine with 8GB RAM, SSD, i7 (4/8) and Oracle JDK and Eclipse 4.4.2. Eclipse works very well. Btw this is on OSX, but some people here use Windows, and it seems to work well on that, too. Hope this helps!