How to speed up the eclipse project 'refresh'

Question

I have a fairly large PHP codebase (10k files) that I work with using Eclipse 3.4/PDT 2 on a windows machine, while the files are hosted on a Debian fileserver. I connect via a mapped drive on windows.

Despite having a 1gbit ethernet connection, doing an eclipse project refresh is quite slow. Up to 5 mins. And I am blocked from working while this happens.

This normally wouldn't be such a problem since Eclipse theoretically shouldn't have to do a full refresh very often. However I use the subclipse plugin also which triggers a full refresh each time it completes a switch/update.

My hunch is that the slowest part of the process is eclipse checking the 10k files one by one for changes over samba.

There is a large number of files in the codebase that I would never need to access from eclipse, so I don't need it to check them at all. However I can't figure out how to prevent it from doing so. I have tried marking them 'derived'. This prevents them from being included in the build process etc. But it doesn't seem to speed up the refresh process at all. It seems that Eclipse still checks their changed status.

I've also removed the unneeded folders from PDT's 'build path'. This does speed up the 'building workspace' process but again it doesn't speed up the actual refresh that precedes building (and which is what takes the most time).

Answer 1

Thanks all for your suggestions. Basically, JW was on the right track. Work locally.

To that end, I discovered a plugin called FileSync: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/filesync/

This automatically copies the changed files to the network share. Works fantastically. I can now do a complete update/switch/refresh from within Eclipse in a couple of seconds.