JDeveloper Memory And Performance

September 7, 2012 - 5:02pm — bex

I was recently doing some training on ADF, and the students were complaining how slow JDeveloper was... Dragging and dropping Data Controls onto a JSF page? It's the pause of death if you will. Not to mention the "Out Of Memory" errors that crop up in the middle of debugging a large app. Very frustrating for developers, so I decided to once and for all get figure out what magic JVM tuning parameters would speed it up.

As a general rule, Java is optimized for throughput, not latency. Once the garbage collector kicks in, performance drops like a rock. A 2 second pause every once in a while is OK for a server, but for an IDE it's misery. So here's the fix:

1. Go to your JDeveloper root directory, is should be something like C:\Oracle\jdev\Middleware\jdeveloper
2. Open the file ide\bin\ide.conf, scroll down to the default memory settings:

           AddVMOption  -Xms128M
           AddVMOption  -Xmx768M
   

3. Boost the memory to something larger, like so:

           AddVMOption  -Xms1024M
           AddVMOption  -Xmx1024M
   

4. Open the file jdev\bin\jdev.conf
5. Add the following config settings:

           # optimize the JVM for strings / text editing
           AddVMOption -XX:+UseStringCache
           AddVMOption -XX:+OptimizeStringConcat
           AddVMOption -XX:+UseCompressedStrings
   
           # if on a 64-bit system, but using less than 32 GB RAM, this reduces object pointer memory size
           AddVMOption -XX:+UseCompressedOops
   
           # use an aggressive garbage collector (constant small collections)
           AddVMOption -XX:+AggressiveOpts
   
           # for multi-core machines, use multiple threads to create objects and reduce pause times
           AddVMOption -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
   

6. Then restart JDeveloper... If it doesn't start, you'll need to reduce the amount of memory allocate in the ide.conf file from step 3.

And that's it! Your mileage may vary, of course... And you may need additional parameters, depending on what version of JDeveloper you're running. Just keep in mind that you are tuning Java for shorter pauses, and not greater throughput.

UPDATE 1: some students still had issues, so in addition to the JVM settings, I've found these tips also help out:

Go to Tools / Preferences / Environment, and switch to the "Windows" look and feel. The Oracle look and feel is prettier, but slower.

Disable all extensions that you don't need. This is usually a huge savings... Go to Tools / Preferences / Extensions, and turn off thnigs you know you don't need. One thing I do is disable all extensions by default, then enable only the ones I know I need for my current project. For example, disable everything, then enable only those extensions that start with ADF. This will automatically enable dependent extensions. Enable others (Portal, SOA, RIDC) only if needed.

Open all documents in "Source" mode by default. Go to Tools / Preferences / File Types, and click the Default Editor tab. For all web pages (HTML, JSF, JSP) set the default editor to "Source". You can always click the "Design" tab to see the design. For best results, select items in the "Structure" window (by default on lower left) and edit them in the "Property Inspector" window (by default on the lower right).

If you really want to get extreme... you can install a solid-state hard drive for your workstation. Barring that, if you have enough RAM you can allocate 4 GB and create a RAM driver for your system. This looks like a normal hard drive, but it's all in RAM. Then install JDeveloper on that, and it will be almost as good as a solid state drive.
Other developers have had success using

UPDATE 2: A reader has informed me that this line:

        #AddVMOption -XX:+AggressiveOpts

Breaks offline database support in JDeveloper... so that one will have to be avoided in some cases.