Tweaking your eclipse.ini is always a good idea. There are some nice tutorials out there that will help you improve the performance of your Eclipse, so we won’t get into the nitty-gritty here, but a main part is choosing good JVM memory settings. Profiles for Eclipse will now pick those up and share them with your Eclipse Profile.
To change your eclipse.ini, open it with a text editor of your choice. If you are on Windows or Linux, the eclipse.ini is located in your Eclipse installation directory. On Mac OS, it’s inside the application folder at Eclipse.app/Contents/Eclipse for modern Eclipse releases (Mars / Neon / Oxygen).
The eclipse.ini can be divided into two sections. Startup options for the Eclipse application itself come at the beginning of the file, one per line. The second section begins at the -vmargs option. All remaining options are passed as JVM arguments to the Java runtime.
To tweak your memory settings, just change or add the appropriate memory settings in the -vmargs section:
- Maximum Heap size with -Xmx<value> (e.g. -Xmx2g)
- Initial Heap size with -Xms<value> (e.g. -Xms256m)
- Maximum PermGen Space size with -XX:MaxPermSize=<value> (e.g. -XX:MaxPermSize=256m)
The alternative forms -mx and -ms work as well. Setting the maximum PermGen size is only necessary for Java 7 and earlier. Also beware that -XX:MaxPermSize is a non-standard option not understood by some non-Oracle JVMs. That’s why you can also use the - -launcher.XXMaxPermSize Eclipse startup option instead, which goes into the first section above the -vmargs line. It will make the Eclipse launcher pass the MaxPermSize option to any JVM that supports it.
If you have set any of these values in your eclipse.ini — Profiles for Eclipse is now able to automatically detect and share them with your Eclipse Profile. Try it by using our new version 1.3.10 of Profiles for Eclipse (available at https://yatta.de/profiles). Do you need support for any more JVM arguments or Eclipse startup options? Let us know!
Further notable changes of the release 1.3.10
Install Log — If you should run into an installation error you can now see a detailed log of the reason.
Edit Profile Icon on Hub — You’re now able to change the profile icon on the Profiles Hub directly using the Edit mode on the Profile detail page.
Lost Content Description — We fixed an issue with your profile’s content description being lost after editing the profile in the Hub.
Correct Last Modified — We fixed the “last modified” date of a Profile version inside the Launcher, which did show up with a wrong month before.
In case you missed it — Since June 28th, Eclipse Oxygen is available, as is with the right Eclipse Profiles support for it.
