Re: [ajug-members]: Eclipse performance on linux... (A poll maybe?)

[Angus Berry <angus.berry@elken.com>]

Andy,

I use Eclipse heavily on a daily basis with Linux. During the course of
a workday I'll concurrently run Eclipse 2.1.1, Resin or Tomcat, Mozilla
Browser (with up to 40 or more open browser tabs, one or 2 databases
like PostgreSQL, Ximian Evolution Email, Spambayes running on Python, MS
Internet Explorer under Wine, several ssh sessions into remote Linux
boxes and other stuff I won't bore you with. This same machine stays on
24 hrs a day without reboot. It's no mega power machine, being a PIII
Laptop with 500MB RAM, but everything works well.

I'll flip and reconfigure networking from wireless to wired and
sometimes GPRS via a Bluetooth PC Card all without a reboot.

Truth be told though, Eclipse doesn't run on Linux... Linux is just a
kernel (I don't mean to insult anyone's intelligence, but I do have to
remind myself of that).

What's more important is your distro & JVM. The danger here is too much
choice.

I'm running Redhat 9 with a customized kernel. The window manager is key
also. Redhat 9's default is KDE 3.1 (not Gnome). KDE has released an
updated version.

JVM choice is also key. Blackdown's JVM is basically Sun's Linux JVM,
but they don't have to jump through the same hoops to fix bugs, so they
tend to get done more quickly. However I did get some instability on one
version of the Blackdown JVM so I flipped over to a parallel install of
IBM's Linux JVM which cured the problem (go figure that Eclipse seeded
from IBM & IBM bet on Java on Linux as the future of their stack).

The only real problem I ever get is occasionally doing a mouse over of a
variable value in Eclipse and the pop up will 'stick' on top of all
windows. However this will sometimes happen with Ximian Evolution, so I
blame KDE. The other thing I get is an occasional GC hiccup when I'm
interactively debugging something like a struts app. on Resin which now
will class reload on the fly, but that soon rights itself.

I've talked to other AJUG members who have never had an issue with
Eclipse on their flavor of Linux Desktop.

I wonder how well it would run on Sun's Linux distro :-)


On Mon, 2004-03-08 at 16:20, Andy wrote:
> (Note this is my observation... and may not necessarily be true in general)
> 
> This may not sound very good, but I am yet to see/hear people running
> Eclipse without any kind of trouble on their linux boxes...  (No setup probs, 
> no runtime glitches, glitches because of the linux distro etc, etc. The kind
> of Eclipse usage I am looking at is, Eclipse being used as the primary tool
> (IDE) for an enterprise level project/app development with p/f linux)
> 
> I have been an IDEA user for almost 3 years now and recently (2 months back)
> shifted to Eclipse(An aftermath of a career move from my good old co.) This 
> migration has been really neat and anyways Eclipse was the but natural
> choice. My dev p/f at work is win2k and eclipse runs fine (Though the official
> IDE used is JBuilder 7 and surprisingly I am the only one using Eclipse out
> here (comments on JBuilder left alone).
> 
> Come home, running Eclipse212 on a P4 1.7 GHz, 640 MB RAM machine, with
> MDK9.1 and KDE3.1, its ouch. The performance is really not up-to the mark 
> and I wonder at the claims of speedy and responsive GUI, la SWT. Well, I am
> not trying to flame NOR rekindle the Swing or SWT, Swing vs SWT debate... 
> but this is as I see it. And for people who wanna see a REAL swing application 
> rock on either win/lin platforms, try IntelliJ IDEA and then tell me at least 
> one application even matching it in terms of performance, responsiveness 
> back to back on both platforms (Well, this besides all the FANTASTIC
> features of IDEA).
> 
> I have been fighting these crashes, errors in the native methods, throwing 
> unexpected exceptions further crashes, unbelievable scenarios such as
> problems within the gtk galaxy theme... its further patches for fix... shh... 
> And all this with compatible VMs and commandline options. And wo ho guys,
> try a remote debug thingy with say the WLS server VM... Never ever have I 
> seen my swap space being utilized to this extent... Further more I hate to run
> a GTK application in KDE...
> 
> I know professionally one cannot dictate the development p/f, but given a 
> choice, I wouldn't be surprised if majority choose linux. If I am not wrong, 
> some linux distros even carry Eclipse... 
> 
> I have been a linux enthusiast and have tried to push java in such forums.
> I do believe that linux and java make a great combination. But these forums 
> are pro linux and one of the worst bashing I got once was like:
> 
> <snip>
> >...
> >I do not like java. I do not like trading hardware platform for a software 
> >platform namely JVM.
> >...
> </snip>
> 
> Not to forget the JRE incompatibilities... This goes off topic...
> 
> So, all in all, a thumbs up for Eclipse, but a thumbs down for Eclipse
> running on linux... 
> 
> : Andy