Eclipse memory leaks?

"ecamacho" picked up my post about the memory consumption of Eclipse on the spanish website http://javahispano.org/
Google translation works pretty well for the post and the comments are quite interesting.

Leaks in Eclipse?

One question was, whether I was talking about leaks in Eclipse.
Actually I myself did not, but my colleague and project lead of the Eclipse Memory Analyzer project, "Andreas, Buchen", blogged about analyzing an actual leak in Eclipse. I can highly recommend the article, because it also shows how powerful the Memory Analyzer is.

Does turning of the Spellchecker help?

From what I have seen, yes it should help. Check http://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=233156 for the progress on the spellchecker issue.

Should we wait until the end to analyze the memory consumption of our applications?

IMHO we should not, because as we all know, fixes at the end of an software project are much more expensive than in the beginning.

I often hear :

"premature optimization is the root of all evil."

This has been misquoted just too often.

Hoare said (according to wikipedia)

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."

"small efficiencies"
That quote clearly doesn't say, you should not do any investigations on how much resources your applications consumes in the early phase of your project.

Actually we have some experience with the automatic evaluation of heap dumps and we found that it pays off very well. This could be a topic for another blog post.