Eclipse and OS X (10.4 Tiger) makes me unhappy. Today I witnessed something really stupid. I have allocated 768MB for Eclipse (eclipse.ini) and to my amazement, Eclipse was beach balling (being unresponsive for you non-OS X-ers). This beach balling was due to the simple fact that the Java garbage collector was reading in pages from the swap file in order to throw everything away. Woohoo! This took of course over 2 minutes.
I doubt that Java will ever become a consumer technology with this kind of shit.
I also encounter a lot of issues with latest distribution of Eclipse (ver. 3.3.2). I’ve allocated 1024MB, but that doesn’t help at all. Eclipse crashes every 5 minutes. This drives me crazy!
Alex: I also got hit with frequent crashes on OS/X after upgrading to Eclipse 3.3. Turns out there’s a known problem in the OS/X SWT bindings: http://www.cornilliac.com/blog/2008/02/fix-for-eclipse-33-crashing-under-osx-leopard/
I’m currently running the latest milestone release of 3.4 which works much better.
This isn’t a Java issue. This is actually being caused by the operating system attempting to aggressively page out memory that it perceives as stale. The JVM of course knows better, but it can’t do anything about it because of the virtual memory model. OS X being a desktop operating system tries to determine stale memory based on apps which are running in the background or even which no longer have WS focus. For the most part, this is a good thing, but for long running apps which eat tons of memory (basically, any IDE), it can cause problems like the one you experienced.
Theoretically, this could be avoided either by the OS being less aggressive in its memory swapping, or by the JVM communicating with the kernel to hint at which bits of memory can be safely swapped. Either fix would be trivial for Apple (because they control the VM on Mac), but I don’t see them actually *doing* it any time soon.
BTW, I’ve never experienced this problem to the degree you describe on either Windows or Linux.
I agree with Daniel. BTW, I have this issue with NetBeans and any major desktop Java application, including those I’m developing. I never did any specific measurement, but I do believe the problem is indeed caused by the bad GC + swapping interaction. I try to control that by avoiding to allocate too much memory to Java application, I know that a good rule is to avoid passing the amount of physical memory. Of course this effort would be jeopardized if you run multiple applications that would prevent the Java application to reside entirely in memory. Mac OS X is way, way, way worse than Windows or Linux in this case, running the same things in similar configurations I don’t get this crazy trashing on the other two operating systems. You would expect that a custom-made JVM by Apple as the one in Mac OS X would address this kind of issues, and instead it doesn’t.
I’m running my Eclipse on Windows XP platform and have no idea why this is happening.
i’m using 3.4m6 and it works pretty good.
I partly agree with that.
Of course, my Mac OS X is over 1 year old, so memory is the biggest problem since it only got 500MB back then (so I wold not dare to set 1024
Windows and Java in particular also have strange behaviour regarding memory. On Win XP on a 3GB Dell Notebook I constantly got only 2GB usable by the OS despite BIOS accepting all 3GB. Also if you try to allocate over 1024MB (mx option) on most JVMs prior to Java 5 on Windows this does not work at all. There are also known JVM issues with memory over 2GB on Windows, both 32 and 64bit. Some VMs have fixed that (e.g. BEA’s own) but in general this still lags into Java 5 or 6 at least on Windows.
Coming back to Mac and Eclipse. 3.4 seems a lot better in some areas. Maybe it is just the parts SpringSource has put into their new STS, but RC1 of their Tools Suite based on Ganymede Preview has impressed me by performing a lot better in most similar use cases than e.g. the Europa Java EE Bundle by Eclipse. I may still look for more GB e.g. for Leopard, but those discoveries tend towards a combination of JVM and Eclipse itself (plus Plugins underneath) with a lot of room for their own improvement.
I’m using Eclipse 3.3.2 on OSX and I’m very happy with it. It never crashes and is always responsive.
I am a Leopard, not a Tiger. I think Eelco is also a Leopard.
Right, I’m on Leopard.
I run Photran and it eats 100% of my CPU and god knows how much ram…now do I fix it? ugh!
I have run Eclipse on OS X for years and the only problem I had was early on when SWT didn’t play nice on OS X. My guess is that your machine is in general low on memory. Check your activity monitor with just a browser and see how much memory you have available. My guess is that it is pretty low. Leopard takes a lot of memory by itself and all those cool desktop widgets eat even more even when they aren’t being displayed. I have 1gig on my current machine which was plenty under 10.4 but I am going to add another gig with Leopard. Luckily memory is cheap.
How much RAM does your Mac have? For over a year I had 2 GB and most of the time it went very well with Mac OS X (first Tiger, then Leopard) and Eclipse (3.3.2, 3.3.3). When I started running multiple Eclipse instances next to each other plus Oracle XE on a Linux VM and the usual other programs (Firefox, Thunderbird,…) things started to get unbearable slow. I’ve since the upgraded the hard disk in my MacBook Pro to a 7200 rpm drive and added another 2GB of memory. That helped a lot and everything is running fine. I’ve never had problems with crashing Eclipse (except when a memory module was defect).
Well it only happens with Eclipse 3.3 Enterprise Edition on Unix platforms. For example Classic eclipse (*without some plugins e.g. mylyn*) has never crashed on my Debian.
Anyway, Eclipse is just great for being a powerful platform, SWT is great too, but it is not quite perfect, yet
Just use Xcode or any editor that does syntax highlighting instead of wasting time with an IDE……then you can allocate that RAM to JVM instead of to the IDE
Xcode?? That takes up way too much memory. Why not just use vi or emacs on the terminal for coding. In fact, it would really help if you disabled the Mac OSX user interface and just booted into the console. You’d probably not have any more IDE issues then.
I’m having the same issues and figured that I would just put a hammer through my monitor. The JVM & Kernel quickly stopped bickering and started bi-lateral communications with all parties involved.
I’ve studied J2ME, J2SE and J2EE for two years but then I discovered Objective-C. I switched and regard this as the best decision I have ever made. I suggest that others do the same. I found the class libraries to be works of art – the documentation excellent and the development tools to be far superior to anything I’ve used before. I’ve programmed on various platforms and various languages- in windows linux OSX and a few handhelds. I remember the disappointment and frustration caused by badly designed components and that the only way I could achieve my goals most times was to rewrite those components from scratch. Even this wasn’t enough when one implementation of the same API differs from the next – even devices created by the same manufacturers supposedly implementing the same APIs broke basic functionality like that buttons were mapped to the wrong keys.
Open source is great only because its free – it is inferior in all other regards and that is to be expected if you understand that money translates into time, effort and expertise being allocated to making something the best it can be. Why not pay people what they justly deserve for delivering outstanding work? Work that improves quality of life (for programmers that is) and gives us peace of mind. I have never once experienced the frustrations and disappointments in Objective-C and Cocoa that I used to on a nearly daily basis with open source. Although you finally get the job done its how you get it done that makes the difference. I can finish an objective-c project with a smile on my face but the same project in Java makes me want to find the authors of some of these components and classes and just ask them what the hell they were smoking at the time – or just suggest they get another day job or a different hobby. I can’t say the same about Cocoa and Objective-C. I know it was written by veteran software engineers so if I do find something wrong its going to be something small and insignificant – so far I’m happy – I’ve been happy for over a year now and thats a record no Java worshipper can beat. I’d like to have liked Java – hell I spent a great deal of money and time hoping to become an “expert” but I’ve just been disappointed too many times.
well, if using Linux, Eclipse can be one heck of pain in the neck. As many people stated above, it crashes a lot. Install xulrunner (you need it if you are using Aptana plugins or use Firefox) and boy, you just added RDX to the fire. No matter how many MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME paths you set, Eclipse will keep arbitrarily crashing, frequently enough to help any suicidal guy take the plunge. BTW, I use Ubuntu Jaunty.
Hi, unfortunately, Mac OS X has the worst memory manager ever seen in the OS world.
It is possible to keep your mac beachballing if you totally disable the swap (by modifying dynamic_pager, the process who is responsible for allocating the swap) but this is a bit dangerous. OS X VM has been designed as if memory were unlimited, disabling the swap will resolve beachballing but if your applications requires more ram than actually present on your system, the system will hang. (mac os doesn’t know how to say to an app: “no there is no memory anymore” so it will wait for free memory indefinitely…)
I experienced strong pageout issue with process requiring a lot of memory I/O and disk I/O (eclipse, subversion when the tree is a big, copying a bunch of big files to the disk such as pictures from camera, lightroom…).
To conclude: mac os x sucks a lot if you need more than the half of the memory present on your system or if you need to do a lot of I/O operations.