Eclipse is Slow – Finding out Why

8. January, 2015

In this article, I’m trying to collect the steps to find out the reason when Eclipse is suddenly slow:

  1. Java GC. To find out if that’s the culprit, go to Window -> Preferences -> General and enable “Show heap status”. You will get a little gauge at the bottom of the Window. If the gauge is almost full, then you probably have too little memory.
    Solutions:
    a) Give Eclipse more memory
    b) Close some projects
    c) Deinstall or disable unnecessary plugins
  2. Check the Eclipse Error Log. Maybe there is a problem under the hood.
  3. Some plugin is acting up. Enable Eclipse’s own logging (see below) and watch the console.
    Some plugins have their own console (Groovy, Maven). In the Console View, click the arrow of the “Open Console” button to get a list. The Stacktrace Console – a useful tool to examine stacktraces from some external source – is also hidden there.
  4. The metadata got corrupted. Clean it.

Enable Eclipse’s Console Logging

When you start a Java application inside of Eclipse, you can see the output in a console view. You can do the same for Eclipse itself.

Open eclipse.ini and add these lines right before -vm (or -vmargs, if there is no -vm line):

-console
-consoleLog
-debug

See “Debug Mode“, “Eclipse runtime options” and “FAQ How do I use the platform debug tracing facility”

On Windows, make sure Eclipse is started with java.exe instead of javaw.exe.

Eclipse will log errors and trace information to the console window. Check the output.

Enable Tracing

Many Eclipse plugins offer a range of trace options. You can see them if you open the plugin JARs. Look for a file called “.options”.

If you copy some of those into a file “.options” in the same folder as “eclipse.ini”, you can able various logging options.

Here is an example what the file could look like:

org.eclipse.ui/debug=true 
org.eclipse.ui/trace/graphics=true

Maven m2e Plugin

If the m2e plugin causes problems:

  1. Look into the Maven console.
  2. Try Maven from the command line to see whether it’s a problem with the project in general or with m2e.
  3. Tweak the logging options of m2e by editing 
    WORKSPACE_ROOT/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.m2e.logback.configuration

m2e FAQ

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groovy.lang.GroovyRuntimeException: Conflicting module versions. Module [groovy-all is loaded in version 2.1.8 and you are trying to load version 2.1.9

8. December, 2014

If you see this error while running the code from Eclipse, check the .classpath file for this line:

<classpathentry exported="true" kind="con" path="GROOVY_SUPPORT"/>

In this case, Eclipse adds version 2.1.8 to the classpath and Maven adds 2.1.9. At runtime, Groovy detects both versions and aborts since this will cause subtle bugs.

Solution: Delete the line above in the .classpath file.

If you see a line which contains GROOVY_DSL_SUPPORT, then you can leave that in – the Groovy plugin will use the JARs which Maven adds to the classpath.

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Eclipse Finance Day 2014: Testing business applications with RCPTT

3. November, 2014

RCP Testing Tool (RCPTT) is an Open Source tool for UI testing of Eclipse-based applications. During the demo by Ivan Inozemtsev, I got the impression that they thought of everything:

  • There is a recorder so you can quickly create a test case by clicking thought the application
  • There is an assertion builder where you can say “this element should be red”, “this checkbox needs to be checked”, “this image must be visible”
  • There is special support for all kinds of widgets like text editors where “position” is row/column (i.e. cursor position) instead of mouse coordinates or character offsets. The test API allows for checks like “is styled like a keyword”.
  • If the UI is resized after the tests have been recorded, the tool will try to calculate the relative click point. Unless the UI element is special (like a graph editor) where it has different heuristics (like when you clicked in an empty area but now, there is something below at the coordinate). If everything else fails, the testing tool will try to resize the UI element to the recorded size.
  • There is a compact, extensible DSL to describe the test cases. The DSL supports procedures so you can reuse test code.

The tool was fast and stable during the demo. It could reset Eclipse’s workspace to a certain state (open perspective, open editors, open projects) – I’m currently thinking about using it to create the default workspace for our development team.

One more things from the demo: Black box testing is a myth or at least a dream. A testing tool for anything complex needs to know internal details (like Eclipse’s background jobs). Otherwise the tests will either fail randomly when some background job didn’t complete in time or they will be slow (since each of them will be sprinkled with “WAIT 1 MINUTE” instructions) or they will be sprinkled with application specific “wait” instructions.

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Eclipse Finance Day 2014: Automating user interface tests with behavior-driven development (BDD)

3. November, 2014

The last two talks were about testing.

“Automating user interface tests with behavior-driven development (BDD)” by Jose Badeau and Dietmar Stoll used an Xtext-based DSL to connect requirements, wireframes and test descriptions so they can validate each other. In the example, they removed a field from the wireframe mockup and the Eclipse editor for the test cases showed errors where they were used in the DSL.

The demo showed once again how much power lies in connecting information from different sources. If you remember, then this was the key feature which set Eclipse apart from all the other Java tools in 2001: It could bring you to the place where something was defined by pressing F3 or Ctrl+Click. If you changed one file, it would instantly compile all the other files and show you any problems it would find. Having a tool which actively searches for problems saved and still saves a lot of time.

 

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Eclipse Finance Day 2014: What Finance Systems can learn from Embedded Systems

3. November, 2014

Thomas Schuetz from Protos Software showed some surprising similarities between embedded and finance systems: Both need to run a long period of time without human interaction, they shouldn’t show “odd” behavior, and you can’t simply shut them down to look for a bug.

Granted, lives are much less at risk when a financial software crashes (as opposed to, say, a pacemaker). So at first glance, the strict safety rules which apply to embedded systems seem too strict for financial software. But safety is built on top of reliability. And we very much want reliability in any system we build.

An important tool here is tracing. Tracing is the pedantic brother of logging. The goal is to collect enough data to simulate the state of the system at any point in time.

In a demonstration, he showed a demo for project eTrice. In a mix of a textual and UI editors, he created a simple application with two objects that could send data back and forth. Since everything is based on EMF, changes on one side are immediately reflected on the other. As a free bonus, you get a sequence diagram of the whole process by clicking a button after the application has finished.

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Eclipse Finance Day 2014: Sirius – create your own graphical designers for IT and EA

3. November, 2014

Etienne Juliot from Obeo, demonstrated Sirius, a tool to create your own modeling tools in Eclipse. Under the hood, the new UI editors work on EMF models. If you struggled with EMF (and it’s … uh … “basic” set of default editors), you should definitely have a look.

The tools also work well with Xtext, so you have a mix of textual (detail) and graphical editors (overview) in your product. The magic sauce in EMF makes sure that updates on one side propagate to the other.

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Terminal plug-in for Eclipse

6. August, 2012

If you’re like me, then you’re spending a lot of time using console windows because some tasks are just so much more efficient (recalling old commands, pipes, …). If you use Eclipse, you will always struggle to squeeze the terminal window on the screen somewhere.

To help with this situation, Google has developed a plug-in to embed a command-line terminal into your workspace: ELT

It currently supports Linux (x86 32 and 64 bit) and Mac OS X (PPC, x86 32 and 64 bit) only. ANSI escape sequences (incl. color codes) are supported as well a hyperlinks.

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CBI or Taking The Pain out of Eclipse Builds

20. July, 2012

When a project is young and dashing, mistakes are made. The PDE build process is such a mistake. If you ever tried to build Eclipse (or at least some of the older parts), then you know that this is brittle and the error messages are more like mysterious ramblings of an angry deity than helpful.

Enter stage CBI. From the FAQ:

 The CBI build of the Eclipse platform is intended to produce the same output as the PDE build, and thus facilitate packaging without noticeable change. The noticeable difference the CBI build of the platform makes is ease of use to build the platform. For example, the prototype has consistently demonstrated that a newcomer without prior experience can build the Eclipse platform with under 30 minutes of effort on a machine with a supported JDK & Maven.

What can I say?

Finally!

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Jazoon 2012: Improving system development using traceability

4. July, 2012

When you develop a software, you will ask yourself these questions (quoted from here):

  • Is it still possible to accept a late change request? What would be the impact?
  • What is the overall level of completion of the system or a component?
  • Which components are ready for testing?
  • A failure occurs because the system is erroneous. What parts of the system should I check?

In his talk “Improving system development using traceability“, Ömer Gürsoy shows an approach to answer these. The idea is to trace changes end-to-end: From the idea over requirements to design, implementation, tests, bug reports and the product manual. For this to work, you’ll need to

  • Analyze
  • Document
  • Validate
  • Manage

At itemis, they developed tooling support. A plug-in for Eclipse can track changes in all kinds of sources (text documents, UML diagrams, requirement DSLs) and “keep them together”. It can answer questions like “who uses this piece of code?”

The answer will tell you where you need to look to estimate the impact of a change. That helps to avoid traps like underestimation or missing surveillance.

Today, the plug-in shows some promise but there are rough edges left. The main problem is integration with other tools. The plug-in supports extension points to add any kind of data source but that only helps if the data source is willing to share. The second problem is that it doesn’t support versioning right now. It’s on the feature list.

On the positive side, it can create dependencies from a piece of text (say a paragraph in a text file). If you edit other parts of the text file, the tool will make sure the dependency still points to the right part of the text. So you can make notes during a meeting. Afterwards, you can click on the paragraphs and link them to (new) requirements or parts of the code (like modules) that will be affected. Over time, a graph of dependencies will be created that helps you to keep track of everything that is related to some change and how it is related: Where did the request come from? Which code was changed?

Always keep in mind that tracking everything isn’t possible – it would simply too expensive today. But you can track your most important or most dangerous changes. That would give you the most bang for the buck. To do that, you must know what you must track and why.

A feature that I’d like to see is automatic discovery. Especially Java source code should be easy to analyze for dependencies.

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e4 is here

28. June, 2012

Unless you live under a rock or you’re not using Eclipse, you can’t possibly have missed it: Eclipse Juno (or 4.2)

If you’re unsure what happened to 3.8 or 4.0 and 4.1, here is the story in a nutshell: A small team of Eclipse developers was concerned about the state of the platform (platform is the part of Eclipse that knows what a plug-in is, how to find, install and load them and arrange them in a neat way called “perspective”). When the platform was developed 2004, it was based on VisualAge. Don’t ask. Like all “visual” tools, it had … issues. Many of them were hardcoded into the platform. For example, there are many singletons in there. Many. Testing the platform is either a nightmare or slow or both.

The e4 team decided that something needed to be done. Only, it was risky. And it would take a long time. Which meant that the PMCs probably wouldn’t approve.

Therefore, they came up with a cunning plan: Develop a new platform (e4) alongside the official Eclipse releases. e4 would get a “compatibility layer” that would allow to run the old junk (like the JDT) but it would also allow to write plug-ins in a new, clean, understandable way. For example, in 3.x, you can use this code to get the current selection:

ISelection selection = getSite().getWorkbenchWindow().getSelectionService().getSelection();
Object item = ((IStructuredSelection)selection).getFirstElement();

The same code looks a bit different in e4:

@Inject
void setSelection(@Optional @Named(IServiceConstants.ACTIVE_SELECTION) Contact contact) {
    ...
}

e4 will call this method every time the user selects an instance of Contact in the UI.

The whitepaper gives some more details. Lars Vogel wrote a pretty long Eclipse 4 RCP tutorial.

After two years, e4 was deemed stable enough to make it the default release.

Conclusion: e4 doesn’t get rid of all the problems (p2, OSGi and SWT are still there) but it’s a huge step forward.

Related links:

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