I love my Mac but using Eclipse can be painful at times. It slows down to the point it’s unusable and the problem seems to have gotten worst recently. So today, after watching my CPU jump to 100% usage every-time I typed or scrolled I did a bit of a scan of the Eclipse bug list to see if I could find an answer.
Bug 95475 sounded like a good place to start, a good number of other mac users complaining about the same thing as I was experiencing. I began to read through the comments. A few made mention of the fact that the slowdown occurred after running a swing application. I realized that this was also true in my case (I’m working on a swing application for corporation x). Then I read this comment.
I’ve been trying to pay more attention to this “slowdown” problem and quantify it a bit and since
yesterday, I’ve had some interesting observations. I started on 3.0 (3.0.1?) and had it running for a
couple of days without doing much (powerbook was slept a couple of times).Then, after using it for a period of time, maybe an hour, I noticed that scrolling was slow. I timed it,
using the menubar clock. Clicking in the “page down” part of the scrollbar, it took about 2 seconds
after I clicked before it would actually scroll.So I launched Quartz Debug to see if it was in a redraw loop, as a previous comment suggested and the
strangest thing happened. I noticed that after I launched Quartz Debug and turned on “Flash screen
updates”, the speed in Eclipse was just fine.Throughout the rest of the day, every 15-30 minutes it would become slow for typing and scrolling
again. Simply launching and then quitting Quartz Debug returned the performance in Eclipse to
normal. I was able to repeat this at least 3 or 4 more times.Finally, at the end of the day, I upgraded to Eclipse 3.1RC1. Today, the same thing happened in
3.1RC1, and again launching and quitting Quartz Debug fixed it.
Sure enough launching Quartz Debug sped things back up for me.
So now I have Quartz Debug in my launcher panel. A quick run and quit every so often keeps Eclipse singing. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it certainly makes life better. Now I have no excuse not to get a 17″ powerbook 