Sunday, January 15, 2012

Making Eclipse Fly on Mac

As David Salter posted:

On a Mac, the following procedure allows the JVM settings to be changed:


  • Find Eclipse in the Finder. Right click on Eclipse and choose "Show Package Contents"
  • Browse to the Contents | MacOS directory and edit the eclipse.ini file
  • In this file add JVM options, one per line.


The JVM options that make the biggest difference are the ones that specify how much memory Eclipse can use.

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-Xms512m
-Xmx512m
-XX:PermSize=256m
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

I also tell the JVM not to verify bytecode using the -Xverify switch

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-Xverify:none


According to the NetBeans performance tuning tips, changing the garbage collection policies can also make a difference. I’m not sure that these make much of a difference, but I’m running with them at the moment to see if there is any difference.

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-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
-XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled

See the entire post.