JDeveloper Memory Tuning

So, as a developer, you get increasingly frustrated by JDeveloper becoming slower and slower throughout the day where it comes to a point that typing a character takes 3 seconds to come into the screen. This is primarily because the heap is slowly running out.

To increase the time it takes to reach this pinnacle state, you can do a few things:

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS WILL ONLY SPEED THINGS UP INTERNALLY WITHIN ADF - It will not solve your general computer slowness down when running JDeveloper ie if you run Windows XP still, where the 3.3g limit really limits the developer.

1) The first I would recommend is to turn the memory monitor on. This will prove that the performance hit is indeed memory related and not, say, a virus checker in the background.

Do this by adding the following argument to the end of %JDEV_INSTALL\jdeveloper\jdev\bin\jdev.conf

#show heap/permgen in memory monitor within JDeveloper
AddVMOption -DMainWindow.MemoryMonitorOn=true

Setting this on will also prove that the heap memory in change in 2) is working.

2) Next step is to increase the JAVA HEAP. You can do this within the following file

%JDEV_INSTALL\jdeveloper\ide\bin\ide.conf

There are the settings I currently have running in 11.1.1.6:

AddVMOption  -Xmx790M
AddVMOption  -Xms790M


3) Whilst increasing the heap, you may need to tweak the perm gen, the area where java classes get loaded into:

%JDEV_INSTALL\jdeveloper\jdev\bin\jdev.conf

change the MaxPermSize to:

AddVMOption  -XX:MaxPermSize=400M

Summary

Its kind of a "try and try again" approach with these settings but this is what I work with and the only slowdown I  get is within the integrated weblogic itself.

Keep an eye on the memory monitor as its useful in telling you what area of memory you need to tweak if you getting slowness within JDeveloper itself.

Happy coding.