IT-Box

If your computer goes slower while working in a big project, you recognize that you need to do some tweaks to work more fluidly. Here i share some of my tricks that meaningfully speeds up my eclipse work flow.

Disable mark occurrences

Open preferences (choose of project wide or global wide preferences is up to you) window and type “mark occurrences” in filter text box. Select the “Mark Occurrences” from the list box and remove the tick from “Mark occurrences of the selected element in the current file” check box.

Remove structured text validation

This time type “validation” into the filter text box in preferences window and select “Validation” from the list box. You’ ll see some of file types that are promised to be validated. Deselect validation ticks from all of the file types in the list (you can do it manually later if you want to). You’ll see a really very big difference in eclipse performance if you have big xml and wsdl files. For a example in my last J2EE project, my web.xml files contain 1400 and wsdl files contain thousands lines of text so eclipse couldn’t handle all the validations while computer memory is avarage

Do not use subclipse plug-in

Subclipse consumes so much system resources and effects eclipse performance greedily in big projects. If you could, consider not to use subclipse especially in projects that contain thousands of code kept in subversion source repository. It’s really become a very heavy-weight plug-in with heavy-weight code. You should feel better using subversion from the command line or from a seperate client

Consider converting your static code to a jar library

This advise can be possible more likely when you have static code automatically generated from static wsdl belongs to a web service. By this way you reduce the raw code size in project and use the code functionality from compiled classes to force eclipse to use fewer system resource.

Configure java virtual machine memory management start up arguments

In your eclipse.ini file, set -Xms40m and -Xmx256m args as your needs. This options define minimum and maximum memory usage bounds which passed to java virtual machine to manage eclipse application domain’s memory allocation tolerance. You can tweak this values and experiment your optimum eclipse speed.

Also if you have problems in eclipse’s memory management in Linux os environments like having lots of out of memory errors, you should define permgen space argument in eclipse.ini file. Setting this arguments as needed, you will have very few (or not) sudden memory exceptions. Try these -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m values if you got for about 1GB ram in your machine.

Finally the Eclipse version i currently have is 3.3.1.1.

• 1 Comment

Here’ s a list of some useful lightweight terminal applications which i use mostly on my linux distro.

htop

Htop is young and beautiful sister of top on gnu/linux. It views your processes on your system with resources they use in a more visual way that top does. Htop provides fully customizable pretty colored widgets like gauges that display total system resource usage.

Mutt

A superior e-mail, newsgroup client that works on terminal with a simple configuration and setup. If you love to work on terminal and want to access your incoming mails rapidly on terminal then you can easily adopt to Mutt

Finch

Finch is a terminal clone of famous IM client Pidgin and is developed again by Pidgin developers. It has almost the same visual apperance as Pidgin on X but this time on terminal. It uses ncurses libraries and worths to give it a try.

SnowNews

SnowNews is a simple feed reader that supports all versions of RSS and OPML. It uses libxml2 and ncurses libraries and has many smart features like cookie handling, auto http redirection, caching and colored customization.

Mpd - Ncmpc

Mpd is a music player daemon which publishes your music directory to a local port or to a shoutcast server. You can use it as a remote access point for your own music box on public or private network. It uses a special protocol implemeted by mpd developers. The client which i should suggest is ncmpc which plays your music box in your terminal enviroment with a simple nice looking interface. It has a sweet looking digital clock too.

Midnight Commander

Famous file manager for terminal environment which gets easy your file system operations, also you can login to ssh or ftp server to manage your remote files.

ccze

if you get blind in long logs, try them to colourize with ccze. It simply represents your logs in fancy colours to you. If you monitor your syslogs, apache logs or etc… so much, try this and don’t get lost in log hell.

BitchX

The most stable, commonly used, robust irc client in the world that sits on terminal. Also i want to share a quote from bitchX website :),

BitchX is the most popular IRC client among Unix systems. You can also use it on Windows, but if you had a Picasso painting, would you put it in the bathroom?

LoL…

screen

Probably you already have screen in your os if you use unix or unix like system and again probably you already know what screen is but i want to add it to this list for whom who doesn’t meet it if any. Screen is terminal multiplexer which means that you could have more than one interactive shell session in the same terminal screen. ıt’s very useful espacially when you open a remote shell session (ssh connection).

XMonad

It’s a fantastic X window manager for unix like systems which organizes windows in useful tiling algorithms. Windows will not float until you want and you’ll never miss a gnome - KDE like enviroment when you adopt this. I strongly suggest if you work in terminal emulator too much.

Finally,

So, i will add any application to this list if i remember or meet a new one. Feel free to share any if you think it must be in the list.

• 3 Comments