There are a couple of questions/answers on SO that might help you :
- Tricks to speed up Eclipse
- How to speed up the eclipse project ‘refresh’ ; I’m using the filesync plugin suggested there every day, and it’s a real pleasure : 10 seconds for an SVN update, instead of 5 to 8 minutes (my files being on a network drive) ; same when launching Eclipse, as it was the “project refresh” that took time, exactly like you described.
- Eclipse optimizations
Maybe those posts will help you at least a bit 🙂
If not : can you tell us a bit more about your set up ? Which plugins are you using, how big are your projects, which OS do you use, what kind of computer (CPU, RAM, …) do you use …
One thing that will help for sure, is getting more RAM, at least if you only have 1 GB : that’s definitly not enough for Eclipse ; in my opinion, 2 GB is the minimum required, if you want to be able to run anything else (browser, mail, whatever, …) at the same time.
Couple of other ideas include :
- Using sun’s JVM ; using the last version is probably a good idea
- Using the latest version of Eclipse, too (For PHP, I’ve seen great things when switching from PDT 1.x to 2.x, at least)
- Configure your JVM / eclipse.ini properly