title: Eclipse: Slow startup time
body: <p>I've got Eclipse 3.6.1 on my MacBook Air (2010), and I'm getting slowish startup times. Well, slow, compared to my Desktop, which is somewhat less powerful and a few years old).</p>
  
  <p>The startup generally takes 15 seconds, and of this, 4 is spent just on the Eclipse splash screen, before Eclipse loads anything. No projects are open at startup.</p>
  
  <p>Here's a copy of my eclipse.ini.</p>
  
  <pre><code>-startup
  ../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar
  --launcher.library
  ../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.1.1.R36x_v20100810
  -showsplash
  org.eclipse.platform
  --launcher.XXMaxPermSize
  512m
  --launcher.defaultAction
  openFile
  -vmargs
  -Xms256m
  -Xmx512m
  -Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns
  -XstartOnFirstThread
  -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts
  -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6
  -Xverify:none
  -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
  -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
  -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled
  -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions
  
  -XX:+AggressiveOpts
  -XX:+StringCache
  -XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods
  -XX:+UseLargePages
  -XX:LargePageSizeInBytes=4m
  -XX:AllocatePrefetchLines=1
  -XX:AllocatePrefetchStyle=1
  -Dide.gc=true
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem doesn't seem to be related to plugins - I've disabled the ones which I don't need, and regardless of this configuration or whether all of them are selected on startup, it only takes 1second to load the plugins.</p>
  
  <p>I'm running Eclipse 3.6.1 Cocoa x64 build (vanilla) with the Zend Studio plugin. The machine has 4GB RAM, an SSD with over 64% free space, 1.6GHz (4MB L2 Cache). OS is Mac OS X 10.6.6, latest Java available, 1.6.</p>
  
  <p>For comparison, my Desktop, an old P4 3GHZ (512K L2 Cache) with a 7200RPM drive, under 40% free space, Eclipse (same config) loads in under 7 seconds, consistently. Note, this one is a Windows machine, with latest Java installed.</p>