Why are my Eclipse project builds so slow?

Question

We use Eclipse (Indigo, with STS). Certain of our projects take inordinately long to build. Often the progress indicator sticks on, say, 87%, for 30 seconds.

I'm trying to find out what Eclipse is spending it's time on during the build cycle. I hope to be able to optimize the build or disable components that are causing it to be so slow. I'd like to see a log file saying ("compiling java code", "processing resources", etc).

I've poked around the log files in the .metadata directory. I've looked on the Eclipse site for tips. I've tried using "-debug" when starting Eclipse. I still can't find the information I'm looking for.

Is there any way to get Eclipse to spit out a log of what activities it is spending its time on when it builds a project?

Answer 1

What kind of projects are these? Java? Dynamic Web? Two things to look at for hints about what's going on are in the project Properties dialog; look at the Builders section and the Validation section. Try disabling the validations to see if that makes a difference in your build times.

To get some insight into what's happening at the times when the build seems to hang, try setting the -debug and -consoleLog options, as described here.