[eclipse-dev] Intermittent Temporary User-Interface Hangs

[Tod Liebeck <tliebeck@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I've noticed some peculiar behavior with Eclipse on my RedHat Linux
8.0/9.0 machines w/ Eclipse.  I'm using the GTK+ 2.0 builds, running on
J2SDK 1.4.1_02.  The problem is that the environment will "hang" on
occasion.  The "widgets" of the user-interface will continue to perform
their "primal" functions, in that scroll bars can be scrolled, pulldown
menus clicked on, etc.  They will however not respond in any way to
actions that make them interact with Eclipse itself, e.g., if I click
File...save, or double click on a file to open it, change perspectives,
attempt to edit text in an editor, etc., the action will not be
processed by Eclipse itself.  These "hangs" typically last a few
minutes, and as such, are quite annoying.  It is not using any CPU, and
is not writing to disk.  There's even plenty of network bandwidth
available.  As far as I can tell there is no specific pattern to the
hangs.

The only thing I can think which might even have a remote chance of
causing this is that sometimes I delete the "eclipse_build" directory of
a project in order to tarball it and back it up.  I always do this with
the project CLOSED, and when I reopen it, I always do a full rebuild.

I have tried deleting all prefs in the workspace dir, but the problems
always seem to come back.  I experienced this problem on three RH8
workstations and two more running RH9.  I have experienced these issues
with 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.1RC*, and 2.1.

Please note that I am not an Eclipse developer but rather a user, and am
posting to the list as I believe it to be the most general of those
available.  If this message is inappropriate for this list please direct
me to a more appropriate forum.

Thanks for your time and a great product.

Best regards
--Tod Liebeck
  NextApp, Inc.