Eclipse Content Assist Slowness with large projects

Question

I am facing extreme slowness in Java Content Assist with a large java project in Eclipse. The project has a lot of dependent jars (>100). I'm not really sure if the slowness is due to the dependent jars, but I'm guessing thats the case.

Have any of you faced similar issues? I changed the Activation Delay to 500ms to reduce the pain but I still get the "Problems with Content Assist" pop up that suggest disabling Mylyn. I also set the following timeout flag.

-Dorg.eclipse.jdt.ui.codeAssistTimeout=60000

It does not seem to have helped.

-Xmx is set to 900m. I am using a dual core 3 GHz Windows XP 32-bit box with 4 GB RAM.

I would welcome any suggestions or solutions you may have.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Eclipse has a bug whereby if you have large complex Jars in your workspace the Content Assist will slow down to the point of being unusable. See my question here for more.

The bug has been fixed but I can't tell if it's in the current release.

Answer 2

If any of those jars or the content in the project are not on a fast, local disk, put them on a fast, local disk.

Answer 3

Are you using Mylyn? If not... disabling the Mylyn content assist will help you a lot.

Answer 4

I was working on a Remote Systems project where JARs were configured from the remote system's /lib folder. I just imported all relevant JARs locally, configured the build path to use these local JARs instead of the remote ones, and Bob's your uncle! The issue is gone!