speed up Eclipse on OSX

Question

Trying to work with Eclipse for Android (ADT plugin) development at my iMac (2.4Ghz, 4Gb RAM) and it's very slow (Eclipse Galileo SR2 x64).
I know about eclipse.ini tricks and make some changes like:

-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Xms256m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops
-XX:+AggressiveOpts
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC

And use Java 1.6 by default:

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6

But still have freezing at small project. Even scrolling of class with 50LOC very slow. At same projects IntellijIdea works much faster.
Have some secret spells to win?

Answer 1

I find the best way to keep eclipse performant is to use as few plugins as possible.

To that end, I keep totally separate eclipse installations for different development tasks (one for Android, one for Python, etc.).

Rather than using one of the prescribed distributions (like "Eclipse for Java developers"), I always start with a PDE installation (i.e., basically no plugins). Then I add only the plugins that I need for the particular task.

I find that startup time, memory usage, and performance are a lot better. None of my environments require more than 200MB of RAM, even with lots of big projects open. Also, no need to mess with eclipse.ini.

As an added bonus, the PDE download is a mere 50MB, not 100-200MB for the standard distributions.