(no subject)

[torkell]

As nice as Eclipse is, it doesn't half chew through memory. 280MB and counting before I restarted it to try and free some up (this machine only has 512MB of memory). Then again, it is a Java IDE written in Java and so completely out of control.

Comments

[13th-einherjar.livejournal.com]

Netbeans is even worse. I actually switched to Eclipse for performance reasons. My suggestions are to make sure that you are using the runtime and not the SDK (Eclipse SDK is for developing Eclipse itself, includes a load of space-hogging features for doing so), ensure that all unnecessary perspectives (resource, maybe debug) are closed, and to try tweaking your system JRE.

Java has been getting better in recent times, but software in general has been getting worse. It now takes 192MB of ram to normally install Xubuntu (the light version of Ubuntu Linux), a system maintained as a low-resource alternative. Remember how only a few years back, 512MB was considered a large amount of memory?

[torkell]

I think I installed the works (SDK, runtime, everything). I might try pruning that back a bit.

As far as the runtime goes, I'm using IBM's version of Java 5.0.

[13th-einherjar.livejournal.com]

Sun's Java 6.0 is out.

Also, there are a bunch of white papers at java.sun.com about tweaking the garbage collector. You could probably get it to do a better job on memory if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of throughput, and might gain some overall if it reduces the swap file usage.