Building workspace with android application takes too long

Question

In the last few days I have noticed some very strange behavior in my android project:

• After every single little change of an xml-resource, the building of the android application's workspace takes a long time.
• The changing of java source files doesn't cause the same slow building

And I have no idea what's going wrong.

I have already cleaned that project but it didn't help.

Is there any way to find out what is making the build process so slow?

P.s.

At about 89% i see the building message invoking 'Android Pre Compiler' on 'proj. name'

Answer 1

I've dealt with various eclipse problems before that slowed it down. A couple things to recommend, enable advanced garbage collection and some of the other items recommended for a performance boost in this article How can you speed up Eclipse?.

Try enable verbose build output in your preferences for android>build to see if any of your specific resources are the bottleneck.

Although I was unable to find the article, I've read about using eclipse in debug mode and profiling the IDE as you work to see if any plugins are causing interruptions.

Last, I have used the community version of intellij idea 10 http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ which has strong android support. It's much faster than eclipse for most tasks, but doesn't have as much embedded android support (you must use ddms as a separate tool, no UI builder, etc...)