How to improve Netbeans performance?

yeradis_30715 0
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Is there a real way to get Netbeans to load and work faster?

It is too slow and gets worse when you have been coding for some time. It eats all my RAM.

I am on a Windows machine, specifically Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition x64, 4Gb of RAM, 3Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, etc. I am using the x64 JDK. I use the NOD32 Antivirus since for me it is the best in machine performance.

In Task Manager netbeans.exe only shows no more than 20 Mb, java.exe more than 600Mb.

My project is a J2EE web application, more than 500 classes, only the project libraries not included (externals). And when I said slow, I mean 3, 4, 5 minutes or more Netbeans is frozen.

Is my project just too large for Netbeans, if it has to read all files to get the state of files like error warnings, svn status and more? Can I disable all this? Is it possible to set it to scan only when I open a file?

My CPU use is normally at 30 percent with all my tools opened, I mean Netbeans, MS SQL Manager, Notepad, XMLSpy, Task Manager, Delphi, VirtualBox. Netbeans eats more RAM than my virtualized systems.

In Linux it is as slow as in Windows in the same machine (Ubuntu 8.04 x64).

It is true that the Netbeans team improved startup speed but when it opens it begins to cache ALL.

I have used some JVM parameters to set high memory usage and others: "C:\Program Files\NetBeans Dev\bin\netbeans.exe" -J-Xms32m -J-Xmx512m -J-Xverify:none -J-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled

But it is still slow.

netbeans jakarta-ee java performance
31 Answers
  • Download the latest Netbeans
  • Remove all the plugins you don't need.
  • Use the latest version of Java
user_60130

Is it a corporate Windows machine? If so aggressive virus scanners can really slow down modern IDEs. Check your task manager for processes that are using a lot of CPU or disk reads.

devstopfix_33660

Also defragment your disk. Netbeans is very aggressive about creating caches of one form or another. Most of them get persisted to disk at some point or another which can affect startup time. Virus scanners (Symantec in particular), Desktop search engines, and any other intrusive I/O product can drastically reduce performance.

I have noticed that Netbeans can be tempermental at times and its performance can vary greatly between two machines with nearly identical specs. My work machine has terrible performance and is unusable at times, but it's lightning fast when I use it on my home machine (with bigger projects in many cases).

James_Schek_178710

I've decided to research for last time why my NetBeans was running slow.

I am running PC with 16GB ram and 3.5GHz 8 Core Processor. My CPU usage is around 5-20%, memory is below 40% yet NetBeans is slower than my 15-year-old PC that I have stashed in the garage.

After finding this topic and going through http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqSlowNetBeans I have realised that in the bottom right corner of the NetBeans I keep seeing a bar that states "Scanning...", after trying to stop it and nothing happening I have looked further at what "Scanning..." was doing and I have realised:

Each time I start the NetBeans, the NetBeans will automatically scan any open projects.

And here it is, I've closed 20 opened projects and NetBeans runs as fast as Notepad.

user_24720680

If its on a corporate machine - make sure that the caches aren't stored on the network

Fortyrunner_168280

A more or less detailed description, why NetBeans if slow so often can be found in the article:

Boost your NetBeans performance

First. check what NetBeans is actually doing on your disk. On a Mac you can issue this command:

  sudo fs_usage | grep /path/to/workspace

In my special case I got a directory which didn't exist any longer, but NetBeans tries to access the folder all the time:

  14:08:05 getattrlist /path/to/workspaces/pii 0.000011 java

Repeated many, many, many times. If you have a similar problem, fix it by deleting your NetBeans cache folder here:

   ~/.netbeans/6.8/var/cache

If your NetBeans.app is still making a lot of disk I/O. Check if it's accessing the subverison folders and svncache.

I had to disable the subversion features with config file:

  ~/.netbeans/VERSION/config/Preferences/org/netbeans/modules/versioning.properties

add a line:

  unversionedFolders=FULL_PATH_TO_PROJECT_FOLDER

SOURCE: Netbeans forums

IMHO it's mainly related to a lot of disk I/O caused by missing files or folders and svncache.

user_2915730

Try to profile Netbeans using VisualVM. If the "hot spot" is org.gnome.accessibility.atkwrapper.emitsignal(), try to run Netbeans with

-J-Djavax.accessibility.assistive_technologies=" "

It helped a lot in my case.

I don't really know why exactly this toolkit used, but looks like it's generally safe to disable it.

user_32587540

Close all the instences you have running. You might not have closed any of them in a while causing them to stack up and run in the background. Therefore causing lag/making the program work slower.

user_115829890

In my case, I got a huge performance advantage by disabling Rainbow (it's a plugin that is used to color brackets in the code):

Tools -> Options -> Miscellaneous -> Rainbow (uncheck enabled)

Tested on Netbeans 10 with Java 8.

The problem of serious slowdowns occurred exclusively with particularly large Java files (more than 5000 lines of code), while there was no problem with smaller files (within 1000 or 2000 lines of code).

I made other optimizations, but this one was the most relevant, because it drastically reduced the amount of CPU used.

user_12775760

The simplest answer to this is to explicitly set Xms and Xmx in the $NETBEANS_HOME/etc/netbeans.conf file. for general cases, the default memory allocation works fine, but for large projects or large numbers of projects, explicitly setting those flags to decently high values will alleviate a lot of the startup lag and runtime stalling of NB during operation.

e.g. on my workstation i typically set NB to Xms=768m and Xmx to upwards of 1536m. obviously tune to your needs and requirements, but that should provide a decent starting point.

user_15583230
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