Eclipse Helios having performance problems Mac OS X 10.6.5

Question

Short Story: My house was broken into MacBook Pro among stolen items. Bought a new MacBook restored from TimeMachine drive including Eclipse folder. System files could not be restored because hardware was slightly different. I did a system update and updated to 10.6.5 and Java 1.6.0_22, all the latest. I run Eclipse Helios for Java development for college assignments.

The problem I am having is that when I run Eclipse and start coding when I get to a method of any type when eclipse usually throws up an auto-complete type box underneath the current line the program hangs for a few seconds while it loads / moves through the list depending on how fast I am typing. Example:

JTextField txt = new JTextField();
txt.get....

I could type the second line out pretty quickly as I know what I am looking for but the program will hang (multicolor swirly mac icon will replace pointer). Eclipse process will spike to 100% and I will not be able to do anything until the auto-complete box finishes whatever it could possibly be doing and the suggestion moves down to "getText()" or whatever the list beginning with "get" contains.

Things I have done to correct include, re-downloading and installing eclipse into another location, creating a new workplace in that eclipse install, re-creating the projects and code files by hand (i.e. not importing anything). The problem still persist.

I am not seasoned enough in Java to abandon the helpful suggestion box, especially when I am learning new things.

Anyone else experience this problem or know a possible solution I have not tried?

Answer 1

This happens with me with Android development, and I have a clue as to why - documentation! If I uninstalled the documentation, meaning the completion list wouldn't show me any API documentation, the completion list was back up to normal speed. Installed it back, the completion list is slow again. This wasn't a problem in Galileo, just Helio.

I'm trying to find the best JVM settings to use with eclipse to see if I can improve things.