Eclipse APT slows compiling

Question

I'm currently writing an Eclipse APT plug-in to check if my annotations are correct.

But it appears that enabling APT causes my compile process to slow down. Even saving a tiny, unreferenced class takes a few seconds and eats a lot of memory.

I think the reason is that the APT framework checks a full tree of objects (large project), even though I only need a single class. Just guessing on this one though.

Is there any way for me to improve performance other than disabling APT?

Edit: first thing i learned was that APT processing runs in phases and i most likely only need one of them

    if (Phase.RECONCILE != Phase.valueOf(env.getOptions().get("phase"))) {
        return;
    }

Answer 1

This presentation (zip download of PPT presentation) from the java-apt team gets into some of the issues regarding improving performance.