Eclipse refreshing workspace takes forever

Question

When I start up Eclipse, ready to rock, I have to sit there and wait for like 5 or 6 minutes until Eclipse get its sh*t together, "Refreshing workspace... (13%)" it states in the status bar while Eclipse is completely frozen.

Is there any way to turn this off or at least speed this "refreshing" up?

UPDATE:

It turns out that the solution was quite easy to resolve by closing projects that where not in use. I currently have about 25 projects and almost all of them are Subversion check-outs. I think that on start-up Eclipse will scan through all open/active projects and do some synchronization of some sort. Closing projects that I'm currently not working on drastically speeded up launching Eclipse.

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

Based on my experience, the Refresh Workspace issue is not always related to the number of open projects. In fact I think there are a couple of different reasons why Eclipse hangs itself shortly after UI start-up. One thing one can always try on different Eclipse versions (Indigo, Juno, or Kepler) is to delete the platforms index files. Just run a find command against your workspace metadata directory and remove *.index files found.

Answer 3

What I did on my case:

1. Rename the project is having issues
2. Restart Eclipse
3. Close the project (if it's still open)
4. Close Eclipse
5. Rename to the original name the project

Hope it helps!

Answer 4

In my experience it's usually a refresh step Eclipse is stuck in. If you click on details on the refresh (waiting) dialog you'll see the steps it takes. My bet is that it's stuck on some server related refresh, you can skip that step by clicking the big red stop button. That should solve it.

Answer 5

There is a file called .lock inside the eclipse workspace folder .metadata.

Delete the file .lock and try to restart your eclipse, it should work now.