Eclipse Android XML files freezing

Question

I have a major problem with Eclipse. Well, I have 100 problems with Eclipse (because it is a garbage IDE), but let me just clarify this one. I am doing Android development. Every time I open, close, or save an XML file, Eclipse freezes for 5 minutes (and hogs the majority of my system's CPU). This happens for every XML file in my android project. And this happens all day long. Needless to say that I have lost countless hours of development time because Eclipse Foundation cannot make a solid IDE. In fact I think Google should dump Eclipse Foundation in the garbage and create their own dedicated IDE for Android..... but I digress.

I have already disabled indexing for my workspace directories on Windows. And I have read the countless posts on StackOverflow about how to optimize the Eclipse.ini file. I have tried it all. I have reinstalled Eclipse multiple times. I have a Win 7 64bit machine running on an i7 processor with 8GB of RAM!! I don't know what else to do besides switch to a Linux-based distro or buy a new laptop. Can somebody give me a professional advice?

Thank you, Igor

UPDATE My wishes came true with Android Studio, and I use that now as my sole IDE.

Answer 1

This appears to be the same issue as #385272 reported in the Eclipse bugtracker, where many people have reported performance problems in Eclipse Juno when switching between editors, with most of the people pointing to the XML editor as the worst offender, with some specifically mentioning Android. In that thread, one user suggested a workaround:

Switching in window->preferences to "Classic theme" and "Disable animations" bring is to an almost acceptable speed - i can work now.

Beyond that, though, it seems that some fixes for this issue and others are available as a patch, being tracked as issue #394588. Apparently, installing the patch fixed the problem for at least one user:

Since I installed the Eclipse UI Juno SR1 Optimizations (comment #212), switching between tabs is much better. Thanks.

You can follow the installation instructions in comment #8 in the patch thread and see if it helps anything for you.

Update (12-13-12):

The aforementioned patches are now available to be installed via the Eclipse update manager. They can be found on the Eclipse 4.2 update site (http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.2) under the category "Juno SR1 Patches". More details can be found on the Eclipse wiki here.