Recurring eclipse hanging

Question

I use eclipse to do php development. I recently developed an issue where the IDE would hang, and immediately return to hanging whenever I opened eclipse. It said it was hanging on "Initializing Java Tooling. I reinstalled java and eclipse in multiple editions. I deleted my workspace. I finally deleted the workspace and did a new checkout of my project, at with point it started working again.

Okay, so something screwed up in the project. Fine. I got it resetup, created a few files I need to run the project from the development directory using a local server (.user.ini and a php files), and was able to run it and make a couple changes. Everything working. I was adding a couple of files and noticed that the files I had manually created weren't showing in the package explorer, so I refresh at the root level and.... it hangs.

I eventually kill the app and on relaunch I can still work with the one file I had open, but whenever I reopened the project directory it hung. I deleted the workspace and tried to recreate the project from the existing source, but after entering the source directory and hitting next, it hangs.

Am I doing something to the project directories that would cause eclipse to hang?

Answer 1

First try to clean your project and see if it solves the issue for you.

if not take a backup of .metadata folder(just in case you need to revert back) and delete the following directory:

YOUR_WORKSPACE_HOME/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.project

or

YOUR_WORKSPACE_HOME/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.projects

restart Eclipse problem should be solved.

it solved things for me after wasting several hours on other solutions..

Answer 2

For me, I fixed it by granting eclipse administrator rights and starting eclipse in cmd with:

eclipse.exe -clean -clearPersistedState

Answer 3

Turns out the problem was that eclipse was processing the sessions directory which I had configured to exist within the projects root directory. Anytime I refreshed the tree it processed all the sessions files which apparently was enough to take 10+ minutes. Weird.

After telling eclipse to exclude it, all is well again.

Update:

If you're having the same problem I had, then in eclipse you should be able to see a directory that is full of hundreds or thousands of text files. Eclipse will try to process them. To tell it not to, right click on the project, then click properties -> resource -> resource filters. Add an exclude all rule where the name matches the folder name. You may also want to do this for any .svn folders or the like.