Eclipse online access extremely slow--cannot complete updates or install new software

Question

I'm trying to set up an Ubuntu 10.10 image in VMWare to do some Android development (my machine actually runs Windows 7 64bit). I've downloaded Eclipse 3.6.1 and when I tried to install the Android Tools by going to Help -> Install New Software, Eclipse would just get stuck trying to download the software. Even after 20 minutes no progress had been made.

I tried to check if Eclipse had internet access by checking for updates, and this too is having problems. If I do Help -> Check for Updates, Eclipse will start to search and then take a very long time to do any progress. It took like 20 minutes to go from 12% complete to 25%, and then 30 minutes to go from 25% to 50%.

I installed the Java JDK just a few minutes before at full speed, so I know it's not something to do with my VMWare setup. Any idea as to what could be happening?

Answer 1

You're right, Eclipse updating can be horribly slow, regardless of connection speed.

From what I can tell, this is because it checks a whole bunch of slow servers looking for updates every time you try and install something. You can disable this behaviour in the "Install New Software" dialog by unchecking the "Contact all update sites" option. I find that things go an awful lot faster then.

Answer 2

I had the very same issue recently, but finally I managed to figure out what is causing the extremely slow network connections in Eclipse. Actually the issue isn't the low bandwidth, but connection timeouts. The solution in my case was to disable all unnecessary network adapters in Windows like Hamachi's and TeamViewer's adapter.

Answer 3

Another solution that worked really fast in my case:

• Do the normal procedure for new software install and wait for getting the "timeout" error message.

• In the timeout error message window you can see the URLs of the packages you had requested to download: copy-paste the URLs and download these packages manually (in my case was always very fast) and place them in the eclipse's /plugins directory.

• (Restart eclipse?) then relaunch the normal new software install procedure exactly like before (do it from the workbench window). Then this time in my case it installed the packages in just a few seconds maybe I am missing out the real cause why this solution makes things better but well it worked.