Eclipse hangs for 3-4 seconds before displaying a tooltip message

Question

I've searched the Internet like crazy, however "WTP freeze" or "Eclipse freeze" yields so many different results that it's virtually impossible to find the right one. I have the following issue.

In a HTML or CSS editor when I accidentally hover my mouse over an attribute value, Eclipse hangs for 3-4 seconds with CPU at 100% load before producing a tooltip message with some info on the tag and its attribute. I don't need those tips. Hell, I don't even need syntax coloring if that would prevent me from this hang.

I tried disabling all the autocomplete features, everything that seemed related, however that didn't change a bit. I looked for a setting to disable WTP completely without uninstalling it, however again - no luck.

I use Eclipse Helios. I have all the latest plugins. I'll supply any additional info, if that is needed.

Has anybody had a similar issue and was able to resolve it? This is really driving me crazy.

BOUNTY

The bounty will go to anyone who finds a way or a workaround that will make pop-up windows reasonably fast. I've had this issue in Eclipse in numerous places - like PyDev for example:

Eclipse PyDev completion hangs (yet again)

I have a strong programistic feeling that this is a general issue with pop ups and not so much with WTP/PyDev. Here are measures that I've already taken:

• Installed the latest Eclipse from scratch
• Installed the two problematic plugins on this clean installation (WTP/PyDev)
• Made sure that Eclipse has more than enough memory
• Made sure the appropriate JVM is chosen

My setup is Ubuntu Natty, Oracle Java 1.6 - latest version in the repos

Further findings

Ok, I've just found out that 99% of the time of the freeze is spent inside a call to org.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.OS._gtk_widget_realize which doesn't seem right. Any clues?

I'd encourage everyone who has experienced this issue to vote for this bug on the Eclipse bug tracker.

Answer 1

Wow, finally nailed it, thanks to one of the suggestions.

Hover messages can be disabled under Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Structured Text Editors > Hovers tab > Combined Hover.

Eclipse can be a labyrinth sometimes.