"The performance of Eclipse (and other large Java applications) has long suffered due to the Windows virtual memory manager," writes Jon Eaves in a recent blog

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Windows has a tendency to preemptively swap Java processes out of physical memory, writes Eaves. Even when there is still plenty of physical memory available.

"This interacts very poorly with Java processes, which do not have good locality and touch a lot of memory. The problem is exacerbated when Java performs garbage collection, which causes the Java process to touch lots of memory that has been paged out to disk. Ever had Eclipse randomly hang for 15-20 seconds? This is most likely the culprit."

He has already downloaded the plugin, he says, "and it works fantastically."

"I've got the settings at 200Mb minimum and 350Mb maximum and Eclipse is very, very snappy," he adds. http://suif.stanford.edu/pub/keepresident/