After all it turns out that crap factor has overcome over the usability factor. Basically Eclipse 3.3 contains some improvements to speed things up. However, in reality it’s just slower then 3.2.x. Reason for this strangeness is the fact that Eclipse 3.2, made big speed improvement by starting to use jar packaged plugins. This reduced disc I/O considerably. Version 3.3 doesn’t offer anything like that, and while extra useless crap is being added into system, net result is that system is just slower.
Primary reason is that by default there is lot of reduntant crap running, and consuming memory, reducing scalability of the system considerably. It appears that Eclipse 3.3 requires practically always ”-vmargs -Xmx1000M” to work at all.
Well, what you can expect when development tool is getting super usefull features like ”Welcome” screen customization. I’m definitely going to now start customize my welcome every week to match my current taste. How on earth I could have been able to live this far without such feature in IDE.
However, some things can be done to improve situation:
- Turn off Build automatically: This improves speed, since now you can make multiple changes, in multiple files, and compile them all at once via CTRL + B. This saves time considerably, since otherwise Eclipse is invoking multiple large compilations, everytime when you save some file.
- Turn off Refresh automatically: Causes slowdown, and is practically useless feature, simple F5 for approriate sub-branch of project does same thing more efficiently.
- Turn off Quick Diff: This feature is useless, and consumes just memory and CPU.
- Turn off Enable spell checking: Come on, this is purely ridiculous feature here, only benefit of it is that it slows down compilation and consumes memory/CPU.
- Turn off Automatic Updates Scheduler: Well, what can I say, this feature is a joke.
- Turn off Refresh workspace on startup: Who is inventing all these features; ”Slow me down society”?
- Turn off Enable animations: Sure…, animations are so productive. Not!
- Turn off Light bulb for quick assists: It’s nice to see real innovations…, welcome back to scene, Clippy.
- Turn off Content Assist Auto Activation: Thx, Clippy, but don’t ever again jump into my face if not called in.
- Turn off Process javadoc comments for compile: Well, reduces a bit compilation overhead. However, has a caveat of causing API specs (== javadoc) to be possible not uptodate; which of course matters only if API specs are written at all.