[Michael Landy]

I am doing a lot of JSP work. My project is large ( a couple hundred JSP files). On some occassions, when I save a file, Eclipse appears to lock up. The screen is no longer updated, the menu bar turns blank, etc… After 30 seconds to a minute, eclipse is fine and I can start editing again. No problems appear, just a very annoying “stall/timeout” for a minute or so.

Any thoughts what it could be?

[Riyad Kalla]

Sounds like a GC cycle, what command line args are you passing to start Eclipse? We would suggest using:
-vmargs -Xms128m -Xmx256m

to avoid long GC cycles like this.

[Greg]

landym,

I was having these same problems with my Eclipse development machine. Doing what Riyad suggested does help with Eclispe GC cycles. However, my problem was with the WindowsXP virtual memory subsystem. Over time the eclipse/jvm instance would get up to 450MB of memory and in the background WinXP would silently start paging out that memory to the disk, even though I had real memory left. And then as soon as eclipse needed some of that paged out memory, wham! it would start a tug-of-war between eclipse/jvm and the WinXP virtual memory manager. They would fight for 2 or 3 minutes at a time, which would happen 5 or 6 times a day. I was literally losing 1 hour a day of productivity.

I knew it was windows specific because I would never get these swap storms on Linux. What I needed was a way to slap WinXP and get it to stop paging out my eclipse jvm memory like pinning the jvm memory in real RAM. I didn’t know of an easy way to do such a thing. So the solution for me was to keep windows from ever thinking it had to page out my jvm/eclipse memory. So I bought 1GB of RAM for my development machine. Problems sovled. In over 6 months I have only had 2 o 3 tug-of-wars sessions while using eclipse with a constant 500MB of jvm memory.

Good luck.

[Author]

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