Eclipse using huge amount of System Memory

Question

I have a sophisticated workspace set up with many eclipse projects in my workspace directory. In total the size of workspace directory is just over a gig, with the .svn directory from subversion a whopping 0.4 Gig, the eclipse .metadata directory just 0.16 Gig and the projects themselves taking up the rest. When I open Eclipse to just do some editing memory usage is huge about 1.5 Gig. Now, here's the interesting part. I fire up a JConsole instance to have a look at JVM and its 800 Meg. I force a garbage collection and get it down to 400 Meg. But, when I look at system memory usage in windows task manager, the eclipse process is still using 1.5 Gig. Now, this means that the majority of memory is system memory not from the JVM. When can this happen? Well in several cases. For example, the application might be using native libaries that allocate memory. But here's the problem, how do I get to the bottom of this? I have tried using sys internals tools such as RAMMAP, ProcessExplorer and VMMAP to see if I can find out what the hell eclipse is chewing up from system and how to stop it?

Any ideas? One could say that this memory usage is expected. If my projects amount to 400Meg. Eclipse is obviously go to chew memory. But, funny thing if I delete all these projects, there is no difference.

Note: the plugins I am using are standard m2e, pmd and subclipe. Eclipse version is indigo. JDK 1.6.

PS sorry for the long question, hope I have explained it ok.

Answer 1

Remove Built automatically funcationality on all projects in your work space. If your project is built by ant change it to use ant builder than defafult java builder. If your project is based on maven use maven to build.

Basically eclipse is monitoring all your projects and when ever you have saved changes it will try to complile and built that project.

If it doesn't resolve issue. Close all other projects which you are not working on and keep only module/project open on which you are actively working on!