Optimising Eclipse Performance

Eclipse is one of the most popular development environment for developers all over the world. Me personally have been using Eclipse for nearly 10 years for many projects. Lately, while working with an intern, I noticed that the performance of his Eclipse is quite slow.

Of course there are many factors that could influence the speed of Eclipse such as the use of poorly written plugins or the wrong user settings. Even the standard installation of Eclipse itself has performance issues.

For years I have been trying to optimise Eclipse performance in many ways. I would like to share with you one trick that I've always do when my Eclipse starts running like an 80 years old man.

Eclipse stores all the changes in a local history. When this history gets bigger, it obviously has some effect on the performance.

In this case, we should release some old entries from the history. The local history can be found at: ".metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.history".

However, instead of deleting the history entries manually, there is an option to limit the size of the history file. In the "Settings" of  Eclipse, from "Preferences > General > Workspace > Local history" the number of items and days can be set.