Eclipse Ganymede 3.4.2 settings

For more recent settings, see Eclipse Galileo 3.5 settings above.

JDK

The best JVM setting always, in my opinion, includes the latest JDK you can find (so for now, jdk1.6.0_b07 up to b16, except b14 and b15)

eclipse.ini

Even with those pretty low memory settings, I can run large java projects (along with a web server) on my old (2002) desktop with 2Go RAM.

-showlocation
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-framework
plugins\org.eclipse.osgi_3.4.2.R34x_v20080826-1230.jar
-vm
jdk1.6.0_10\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms128m
-Xmx384m
-Xss2m
-XX:PermSize=128m
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m
-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=10
-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=70
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:+CMSIncrementalMode
-XX:+CMSIncrementalPacing
-XX:CompileThreshold=5
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote

See GKelly's SO answer and Piotr Gabryanczyk's blog entry for more details about the new options.

Monitoring

You can also consider launching:

C:\[jdk1.6.0_0x path]\bin\jconsole.exe

As said in a previous question about memory consumption.

-showlocation

To make it easier to have eclipse running twice, and know which workspace you're dealing with

Eclipse 3.6 adds a preferences option to specify what to show for the Workspace name (shown in window title) which works much better than -showlocation for three reasons:

1. You do not need to restart eclipse for it to take affect.
2. You can chose a short code.
3. It appears first, before the perspective and application name.

If you are using Linux + Sun JDK/JRE 32bits, change the "-vm" to:

-vm 
[your_jdk_folder]/jre/lib/i386/client/libjvm.so

If you are using Linux + Sun JDK/JRE 64bits, change the "-vm" to:

-vm
[your_jdk_folder]/jre/lib/amd64/server/libjvm.so

That's working fine for me on Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04

If you're going with jdk6 update 14, I'd suggest using using the G1 garbage collector which seems to help performance.

To do so, remove these settings:

-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:+CMSIncrementalMode
-XX:+CMSIncrementalPacing

and replace them with these:

-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions
-XX:+UseG1GC

Eclipse likes lots of RAM. Use at least -Xmx512M. More if available.

-vm
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_07\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll

To specify which java version you are using, and use the dll instead of launching a javaw process

Here's what I use (though I have them in the shortcut instead of the settings file):

eclipse.exe -showlocation -vm "C:\Java\jdk1.6.0_07\bin\javaw.exe" -vmargs -Xms256M -Xmx768M -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:MaxPermSize=128M