[cdt-dev] Memory usage

[aph@xxxxxxxxxx]

Firstly, sorry if this is a FAQ or covered somewhere in the docs.

I've been trying to use the CDT on some fairly large projects.
What I've found it that the parser's memory requirements are quite
alarming.

For example, when trying to parse gcc I ran out of memory after about
330 files.  (The average gcc source file is about 16k.)  I then expanded
the max Java heap to 256M with

    setenv IBM_JAVA_OPTIONS '-Xmx268435456'

and this time managed to parse 2990 files before running out of
memory.  However, many projects have more source than this and I don't
know that it's reasonable to require users to purchase multiple
gigabytes of memory if they want to use Eclipse on large code bases.

So, is this a known issue?  Is there anything I can do to reduce
memory usage?  Is perhaps the parser getting confused by something in
the gcc source?

Thanks,
Andrew.