Eclipse: Should I create a workspace for each project?

Question

I used to keep separate workspaces, but got tired of the difficulty in keeping settings consistent between them. Now what I do is create working sets for different projects and change the current window working set to filter out everything except what I want to work on. So far this has worked fine for me.

Since each project can have multiple working sets, and the window working set can be any combination of working sets, it's quite easy to only see what you want at any given time this way.

I create Eclipse workspaces around products, because for me, a product can have multiple projects within them, for example like having core libraries compiled into one jar in a project, this is used by other projects.

In terms of production environment, you would want products running in different directory structures, much cleaner that way. And in eclipse the workspace creates a directory with workspace name. So, create workspaces based on product/app rather than one or more projects within them.

Not only do I keep separate workspaces for each project but I keep separate copies of Eclipse also. This is because I typically have to put projects on ice for long periods and return to them (with little notice) and they absolutely must build. I can't take the chance that some plugin I've installed for my latest project (maven based) will interfere with the build process of one of the legacy systems (ant based). For the record I do document the eclipse environment for those legacy systems but I don't have time to mess with eclipse when patching a production bug.

If the projects are interrelated (i.e. have dependencies on each other) then it quite often makes sense to have them in the same workspace. Also, if you are working on several projects to solve a related problem, the same applies.

You will waste a lot of time changing workspaces unnecessarily otherwise, especially when the IDE will immediately show you the impact the changes in one project has on another.

I would use separate workspaces for different "groups" of projects. For example you might want to combine your main app project AND the unit testing project together in the same workspace.

Maybe I'm unlucky, but Eclipse often (once a month, say) dies on startup, typically in the "Initializing Java Tooling" stage. The recommended solution seems to be to create a new workspace. If you have all your projects in one workspace, this can be a pain. I think smaller workspaces may mean the crash is less likely to occur.

As the Preferences are workspace-specific, I tend to have a enormous workspace open - I'm too lazy to sync some settings between workspaces (e.g. repositories...).

On the other having too much projects open in a single workspace can slow down Eclipse - so the least I have to do is to close projects I'm not working with. I manage a lot of relative short-term projects (at most one month) in Eclipse, that reside in the same workspace (and in most cases the same repository), so this setup gives me a bigger flexibility.

If you have several, interrelated projects, then keep them in the same workspace. If you can identify group of projects, that are always used together, but the groups are used independently, then put such project sets into different workspaces. In that case that should be the logical structure.