Eclipse freezes Ubuntu, hard reboot required

Question

I'm on a team of 6 developers and we are all using Eclipse Indigo on Ubuntu 11.04. At least once a day, if Eclipse is running, each of us experiences a total system lock-up. The only cure is a hard reboot of the PC. Some of us have had it more than ten times in one day. This does not happen if Eclipse is not running, so I can confidently say that Eclipse is the problem.

I have tried increasing the memory available to Eclipse by going into the ecplise.ini and increasing the Permsize, MaxPermSize, Xms, and Xmx. This has made no difference and everyone's PC is still locking up.

Has anyone experienced this before? I could understand maybe on one PC, but it happens on every single PC!

• Java version: java-6-sun-1.6.026 JDK version
• Ecplise version: Indigo SR1 BuildID 20110916-0149
• Ubuntu version: 11.04 64-bit

EDIT: Ctrl-Alt-FnX keys do not work once the PC has locked up.

EDIT: I've revisited the eclipse.ini settings and increase the memory some more. So far I haven't had a crash yet. I will use the other developers as guinea pigs, but I'm hopeful that these settings will stop the crashing.

-XX:PermSize=256m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
-Xms1024m
-Xmx2048m

Answer 1

This is not to resolve Eclipse problem... which might be happening because of some display issues I suspect.

Instead of hard reboot you can press keystrokes Ctrl+Alt+F1 together to reach console and there you can login to a text based terminal and kill the Eclipse process.

Answer 2

more a comment than an answer, but I cant add you a comment yet.

I'm kinda using the same setup: Ubuntu 11.04 64bit with Eclipse Indigo SR1 RC3 64-bit (buildid 20110909, didnt had time or need to update to a newer release yet, but RC3 is stable for me). Make sure, you have installed the 64-bit version of Eclipse.

• OpenJDK in combination with Eclipse didnt went well for me, so I changed to java-sun jdk 1.6/7. Make sure Eclipse is not referencing to the OpenJDK installation instead of java-sun jdk.

• I had some issues with Eclipse Indigo (pre SR1) freezing in combination with SVN Subversive/m2eclipse plugins. For me it got better with the SR1 (RC3), but still not perfect (a freeze now and then). A while later Subversive SVN had an update, and now it's stable again. In short: make sure, you have installed the newest plugin versions (use eclipse update sites, no local copies). Older versions might lead to the same problems I experienced.

• What other plugins are you using, can you verify if your Eclipse crashes without any plugins installed?

• Two other issues I'm aware of: with Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) rendering UI elements was broken/lead to crashes as well (GTK_NATIVE_WINDOWS). Later Eclipse had problems with the native scrollbars (think it was with Ubuntu 10.10 or 11.04). I'm pretty sure, problem 1 aint an issue anymore with Eclipse Indigo + 11.04. Problem 2 I'm not sure if it was 10.10 or 11.04. But I still start my eclipse with the following script.sh and it works for me, you could give it a shot as well:

  #!/bin/bash
  export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0
  export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=false
  exec $(dirname $0)/eclipse "$@"