When maintaining & developming large web applications you might notice that eclipse slows up a bit. Building workspace, showing the autocomplete or syntax highlighting might take a while to load. The solution for this is to optimise your eclipse.ini and tell your favourite PHP development IDE to use more memory.

After installing eclipse you open the eclipse.ini in the root. If you followed my previous post, the default settings should be something like this :

-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.101.R34x_v20080819.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.gtk.linux.x86_1.0.101.R34x_v20080805
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
-vmargs
-Xms40m
-Xmx256m

This means eclipse will use in between 40 and 256mb. These default settings will allow you to run Eclipse on a pre historic PII with less then 1GB ram, although i wouldn’t recommend that.

Most of you, especially developers working in a development agency, will have powerful workstations. So lets tell eclipse to use a bit more resources

-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.101.R34x_v20080819.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.gtk.linux.x86_1.0.101.R34x_v20080805
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
-vmargs
-Xms256m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

I changed the xms, xmx and xx:maxpermsize settings.

What does it mean ?

• Xms sets the initial Java heap size
• Xmx sets the maximum Java heap size
• XX:MaxPermSize allows for the JVM to be able to grow the PermSize to the amount specified. Initially when the IDE is loaded, the MaxPermSize will still be the default value but will not actually take up that amount until it is needed.