Spring builder is slow in Eclipse - can I speed it up?

Question

When building our Java applications in Eclipse, the Spring builder is very slow and gives no status updates.

Specifically, I start building a project, and Eclipse's Progress pane displays

Invoking 'Spring Project Builder' on 'project name'...

for multiple minutes at a time, with no additional details.

I've already turned off the Spring AOP Reference Model Builder, and I just recently disabled the Spring project builder completely out of desperation.

I'm just building and using these projects, not developing them, so theoretically they should compile fine - but this is our development branch, so I'd still like to keep Spring on in case there's a nasty reflection error somewhere.

So, in order to keep using them, is there anything I can do to:

1. Speed the Spring portion of the build?
2. Display more detailed output during the Spring project building process?

Edit 2010-02-15 21:39 GMT:

I'm specifically referring to the Spring IDE plugin in Eclipse.

Answer 1

I'm assuming you're referring either to the Spring IDE plugin for Eclipse, or the SpringSource ToolSuite bundle.

The big performance killer that I've nailed down is the processing of <import resource="..."/> entries in the beans files. The plugin has an option for enabling the processing of these, and if turned on, it absolutely hammers performance - it searches the entire classpath (including libraries) for each imported resource, ever ytime something changes. I reported this as a bug, and thankfully it's been fixed, but not yet released.

The <import> support is just a nice-to-have, though, since you can manually add the imported files directly. Turning it off makes the whole experience much more edifying.