developerWorks: Tune Eclipse’s Startup Performance with the Runtime Spy, Part 1

“Almost every day we hear of new companies adopting Eclipse as
their application development platform of choice. With all these
companies’ products (not to mention all the Eclipse board member
companies’ products) potentially converging on the same
installation, the risk of memory bloat and performance degradation
is high. This article introduces a very helpful but not well-known
tool, the Runtime Spy, to aid the plug-in developer. The Runtime
Spy perspective is part pf the Core team’s group of Spies and
Tools…

“Eclipse’s architecture is designed to enable the discovery of
extensions to its environment at runtime. This architected
extension capability allows many tools to integrate seamlessly into
Eclipse. The Eclipse architects recognized early in the project
that these extensions could not be defined programmatically in
client code since the cumulative startup cost would become
prohibitive as Eclipse integrated more and more extensions.
Instead, these extensions are defined by plug-ins…”

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