Is Your Eclipse Running a Bit Slow? Just Use This Simple Trick!

Posted on by lukaseder

You wouldn’t believe it until you try it yourself. I’ve been using the Eclipse Mars developer milestones lately, and I’ve been having some issues with slow compilation. I always thought it was because of the m2e integration, which has never been famous for working perfectly. But then, it dawned upon me when I added a JPA persistence.xml file to run some jOOQ + Hibernate tests… I ran into this issue, and googled it to learn that many people are complaining about JPA validation running forever in their Eclipses.

So I searched for how to deactivate that, and boom!

All of my Eclipse got much much faster

In fact, I didn’t just deactivate JPA validation, but all validation:

deactivate all validation in your Eclipse to boost performance

I don’t remember the last time I ever needed validation, or thought that it was a useful feature in the first place. If you want to help your whole team, you can also check in the following file in each of your projects’ .settings/org.eclipse.wst.validation.prefs files:

DELEGATES_PREFERENCE=delegateValidatorList
USER_BUILD_PREFERENCE=enabledBuildValidatorListorg.eclipse.wst.wsi.ui.internal.WSIMessageValidator;
USER_MANUAL_PREFERENCE=enabledManualValidatorListorg.eclipse.wst.wsi.ui.internal.WSIMessageValidator;
USER_PREFERENCE=overrideGlobalPreferencestruedisableAllValidationtrueversion1.2.600.v201501211647
eclipse.preferences.version=1
override=true
suspend=true
vf.version=3

This has the same effect, but can be checked into version control.

Found this tip useful? See also our list of Top 5 Useful Hidden Eclipse Features

Published by lukaseder

I made jOOQ

9 thoughts on “Is Your Eclipse Running a Bit Slow? Just Use This Simple Trick!”

  1. That’s the kind of nonsense that aggravated me and made me eventually switch to NetBeans.

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  3. I didn’t find this file (org.eclipse.wst.validation.prefs) in my .setting folder of my project. I am using Mars.2 Release (4.5.2)

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  4. I may give this a try. I put Eclipse Oxygen for PHP on a CentOS 7 VM, and it wasn’t “a bit slow”, it was PAINFULLY SLOW. So slow, in fact, I gave up and killed the process rather waiting for it to respond. I switched to Netbeans on the same configuration (admittedly low on RAM), and it WORKS like a CHAMP.

    I like Eclipse, but I don’t have that much patience. Maybe if I try your trick, my luck will be better. OR I might just stick with Netbeans which works perfectly right out of the box.

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  5. The recent “Language servers” features are really very efficient also to lose hours of worktime, me I lost my day thinking my hard drive would have a problem, but just after disabling this “feature” (in the Microsoft meaning) my Eclipse 2018-12 came back as it can I think with my cold computer

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