Eclipse startup time (Was: questions on PhanTango 'merger' (was Merging Tangobos into Tango)

Bruno Medeiros brunodomedeiros+spam at com.gmail
Mon Oct 15 15:21:38 PDT 2007


Don Clugston wrote:
> 
> Like I said, it wasn't a flame, and in this post I was not particularly 
> seeking to improve the startup time on my system. I'm simply astonished 
> that a programming community (the Eclipse developers) obviously does not 
> care about performance issues _at all_. I had no intuition about what 
> initialization you could do that would take such a long time.
> 

I don't get this fixation people have with startup time. :/

That Eclipse developers do not care about Eclipse performance is simply 
not true. They merely don't care much about startup performance, and the 
reason is simple: Eclipse, just as Java, is made for medium and large 
sized software development. It's not made for writing Hello World's. Int 
this scenario, a developer works 4 to 8 hours a day (or more), and how 
many times does he start Eclipse per day? Once or twice (in some cases 
even less, like my own case since I have my PC open 24h a day and 
sometimes I don't close Eclipse).
Given this, how does the 4-8 hours of *runtime* (ie., after load) 
performance, or the runtime features compare in importance to the 1 or 2 
loads done during the day? They don't compare at all! Startup time is 
simply a *whole* degree of magnitude less important than IDE features or 
runtime performance.
And Eclipse's runtime performance (at least of JDT) is actually pretty 
good. *And* scalable. In my old PC, an Ahtlon XP 2500 with 1Gb RAM, I 
was able to work with JDT all day long and never (or rarely) notice any 
slowdowns (startup was 10-15 seconds BTW). On contrast, at that time 
with that PC I also did some C# GUI development, with VS Studio 2005. It 
loaded pretty fast (1-2 seconds), but often there were small pauses (3-4 
seconds) when working with the VS's form editors. (which one you think 
bothered me the most...)

Also, out of curiosity (since you said you weren't planning on improving 
runtime performance), how much RAM does that laptop have? RAM is the 
most important spec for Eclipse startup performance (and runtime 
performance too).

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D



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