On Netbeans; memory and speed

It’s about the most common complaint about Netbeans: It needs to much memory! *wine wine wine*
That, and: it’s so slows *cry cry cry*

You know something, there are two simple ways around this “problem”:

  1. If you are running Windos, switch to a real operating system! I recommend:
    1. Kubuntu for people with permanent internet or
    2. SUSE for those who are on dial-up
  2. If you are actually writing code, you need a minimum of 1Gb (preferably 1.5Gb) of RAM
    1. This applies to all software developers, regardless of you language or target platform (I included embedded developers in this statement).
    2. Software developers simply tend to have more software running at any given time
  3. A dual-core CPU does make an enormous difference to IDE performance

I do 100% of my development on a 1.6Ghz Centrino laptop, with 1.5Gb of RAM (533Mhz if you must know), with a standard laptop hard-drive. With this simple configuration I am amazed at the speed when I run:

  • Netbeans 5.5
  • Netbeans 6 beta-2
  • JBoss 4
  • Thunderbird
  • Firefox
  • Kopete
  • Konqueror
  • Amarok
  • Kerry-Beagle
  • Many terminals
  • MySQL

Spread out over 4 KDE desktops, and they all perform as if they were running by themselves. If you have the opertunity, switch to Netbeans 6, as it’s a much faster system than any previous version.

7 Responses to “On Netbeans; memory and speed”

  1. Mr Perfect Says:

    Its “WHINE” and not “wine”. Please dont make the mistake of saying WHINE and dine in your next blog :).

  2. Tim Says:

    “If you are actually writing code, you need a minimum of 1Gb (preferably 1.5Gb) of RAM”

    Bullshit. I have a 2.4GHz P4 with 768MB RAM. KDevelop, MSVC (all versions), Anjuta, Dev++ all run perfectly. Eclipse is unusable and NetBeans is pretty slow, but it is usable and has good code completion.

    The slowness is evidently due to its Java architecture. Saying it isn’t a problem just because I could spend lots of money to upgrade my computer is stupid.

  3. matt Says:

    I have Eclipse 3.3.1.1 currently running with < 400 MB on Vista 64 bit, I have all of the Netbeans platform source (6.5 beta) and about 70% of the NetBeans IDE source loaded. Everything runs smooth as silk 🙂

  4. Jason Says:

    Hey Tim, that’s quite amazing, since I’m about to upgrade to 4Gb on my laptop, since 1.5Gb is just not enough. Granted I do develop with a MySQL database that chews through 500Mb by itself.

    I run Netbeans in a max of 256Mb heap space, though it very seldom hits that limit (only when I switch project groups a lot).

    Bare in mind this post was written about the Netbeans 5 code base. NB 6 uses a fraction of the memory.

  5. Nancy Boy Says:

    I have a PIV 2.26 GHz and 512 Mb ram NetBeans run very very slow, how I can optimize this ?

  6. Sam Says:

    I do dislike “solutions” that begin with ‘switch to a real operating system’. Nice pub talk but not really helpful.

  7. ish Says:

    how to develop android application using netbeans. any source code available for implementation or simulation..


Leave a reply to Tim Cancel reply