Debugging in Eclipse on MacOS X slow - anything that I can do?

Question

on my Mac debugging in Eclipse is extremly slow. With slow I mean stepping through the code. Every step (even if it is only multiline string-concatenation) takes about 1-2 seconds. When I compare that to eclipse running on Windows, that is just painful!

I'm using Eclipse Kepler with Sun JDK 1.7.0_45 (as Eclipse Runtime and Program Runtime). Switching to Apple JDK 6 did not change that much. Is there anything that I can do about that?

Edit:

What I'm trying to do is to debug a local application using Debug As > Java Application.

My eclipse.ini is looking like this:

-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.3.0.v20130327-1440.jar
-vm
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java
--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.1.200.v20130807-1835
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
--launcher.appendVmargs
-vmargs
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.IEVersion=10001
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
-Xms40m
-Xmx2048m
-Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts

Answer 1

Increase the amount of memory for your JVM. Open eclipse.ini from the following path:

Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini

. Edit the following variables like so. Replace 1.6 with your version of Java.

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion = 1.6
-Xms128m
-Xmx1024m

Answer 2

The actual problem was a little bit unexpected: In the eclipse.ini there were two settings:

--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m

and

-XX:MaxPermSize=512m

For some reason eclipse preferred the 256m MaxPermSize setting. After changing that line to 512m everything works nice and fast. sigh software development tooling can be boring. Thanks for any responses to this question!

Answer 3

Remove all breakpoint definitions once and then restart it by adding the ones you need only. Sometimes Eclipse is getting out of synch with some of its internal/displayed state.