How can I reduce Eclipse Ganymede’s memory use?

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I don’t know about Eclipse specifically, I use IntelliJ which also suffers from memory growth (whether you’re actively using it or not!). Anyway, in IntelliJ, I couldn’t eliminate the problem, but I did slow down the memory growth by playing with the runtime VM options. You could try resetting these in Eclipse and see if they make a difference.

You can edit the VM options in the eclipse.ini file in your eclipse folder.

I found that (in IntelliJ) the garbage collector settings had the most effect on how fast the memory grows.

My settings are:

-Xms128m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=120m
-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=10
-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=70
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:+CMSIncrementalMode
-XX:+CMSIncrementalPacing

(See http://piotrga.wordpress.com/2006/12/12/intellij-and-garbage-collection/ for an explanation of the individual settings). As you can see, I’m more concerned with avoiding long pauses during editting than actuial memory usage but you could use this as a start.

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