[news.eclipse.newcomer] Re: Eclipse hates me! Help requested please:

[Eric Rizzo <eclipse5@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kevin Crocker wrote:
> -showsplash org.eclipse.platform
> --launcher.XXMaxPermSize
> 128M (I haven't tried changing this)
> -vmargs
> -Xms40m  (I've tried changing this all the way up to 256m)
> -Xmx256m (I've tried changing this all the way up to 1024m)
> -Dosgi.bundlefile.limit=100
>
> So what do these things mean and why are they so small? Please don't tell
> me to RTFM, I've done that and it didn't help - the docs seem to be in
> Geekish rather than English.

-showsplash: You don't care what that means, trust me.

--launcher...: This is what tells the Eclipse launcher to instruct the 
JVM allocate a larger-than-default Permanent Generation size, if it 
detects that the JVM is a Sun JVM (other JVM's don't understand that 
option). This avoids the Out Of Memory - PermGen problems that arise 
because the default PermGen size is too small for applications with lots 
of classes.

-vmargs: tells the launcher to pass the remaining args to the JVM it 
creates to run Eclipse

-Xms40m: Tells the JVM to allocate a minimum of 40MB of heap space when 
it starts.

-Xmx256m: Tells the JVM to use no more than 256MB of heap space.

[remember that heap space is only part of the total memory used by a 
Java process]

-Dosgi.bundlefile.limit=100: Sets a system property in the JVM that the 
OSGi framework (aka, Eclipse Platform) to limit itself to 100 bundle 
files. I'm not sure the ramifications of this option, but there was a 
discussion that it can cause some trouble on some file systems that 
limit how many open files a process can have open concurrently. IF you 
were to see "too many file handles" type of errors you could try 
removing this option.

Don't forget, you asked what these mean so don't shoot the messenger 
because the details are too geeky. :-)

Hope this helps,
Eric