Eclipse webtools project (WTP) and its performance

Question

Our company is using eclipse since several years now (we are using WTP since release 0.7)

I am currently evaluating eclipse 3.6.2 with WTP 3.2.3 which should replace eclipse 3.4.2 with WTP 3.0.4 as being our main IDE.

And I have to say that once again I am quite disappointed in concerns of performance:
WTP 3.2.3 seems to be much slower than 3.0.4.
In fact I am really wondering why WTP gets slower with each release.

One of our applications (dynamic web project) contain about 4000 java classes and 700 jsps/jsp fragments. We only need basic WTP functionality for developing jsps, xmls and xsd. We don't need high sophistic features like Dali (should JPA tools really covered by a webtools project?), Libra or a visual xml editor in the first place.

Another interesting point is that WTP seems to slow down the whole IDE. SWT is non-reponsive for some fraction of seconds, cpu usage is very high (especially after a built took place - if you look at the system jobs, several jsp/javascript indexers are doing work for some minutes, even if all WTP build validators have been disabled), opening new files are slower, navigating through the project etc.

This can be especially seen on older machines which do contains only a single core cpu.

The worst thing is that I've got the feeling that the WTP dev team does not care much about performance (e.g. have a look at the http://wiki.eclipse.org/WTP_Performance_Tests page - last update took place in 2008).

Bug reports and Newsgroup posts regarding to performance of basic features (e.g. jsp editing/validating) are often ignored or closed after some time, some examples: here, here, and here.

Quo vadis, WTP?

---

Please don't get me wrong:

I don't want to blame WTP.
In fact I believe that WTP is a good open-source project developed by a talented team.
But obviously the project has a problem with its quality assurance, especially in terms of performance which affects usability and user acceptance.

I just want to point out that the team should focus on the things which are essential to most of the users in the first place and afterwards work on implementing super-duper-features.

My Questions

• What are your experiences with WTP, especially the most recent releases?
• Can you confirm or disprove my observations?
• Are there better alternatives?
• Did you switch from or to WTP and why?
• Do you have some best practices to speed it up, especially for upper-mid-sized like ours?

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UPDATE

I'd like to make an update on this question to reflect the current answers and to sum up the current results:

• Many users complain about more or less on the same issues so I see those issues as confirmed.
  BTW, this question is also mentioned on a news post on theserverside.com with additional comments.

• The responsible WTP project lead, nitind, made a notable post on the current situation of WTP, which I like to cite:
  "The simple fact is that we don't spend much time on performance tests because we lack resources for doing that."
  "Of course we'd like to be proactive about it rather than reactive, but we tend to allocate our time to functional problems first."
  

So this question turns a little bit into some kind of an open letter from the community to the WTP team:

Dear WTP team,

it's obvious that WTP is suffering from major quality/performance issues 
which you try to play down or to ignore.
Please invest some time to improve the current situation 
at the cost of new features and do everything what's required 
to solve the current problems.
E.g. revive the performance team, do some regression tests between 
previous releases or ask the community for (precise defined) help.

I am sure that they are enough people willing and able to help here.

If you like, do some kind of poll to get a feeling what should be 
the most important scopes of future's WTP releases.

Please, please, listen to your community.

Answer 1

I've disabled the WTP JSP editor for the reasons you mentioned above: It just needs too many resources. Some more things you should consider:

1. Edit JSPs in the normal HTML editor. That means you don't get code completion which is a good thing. IMO, Mixing Java and HTML is a mistake in the first place and an editor can't fix that. Put all Java code into helper beans (which you can then test easily) and just access the beans from JSP. This should get rid of 99% of all the <% %> tags and solve most of your problems already.

2. Consider using Spring to be able to build more complex beans and inject them into your JSPs using these patterns:

   • How to inject spring beans into a jsp 2.0 SimpleTag?

   • Use SpringBeanAutowiringSupport:

     <%!
         @Autowired
         private Bean bean;
     
         public void jspInit() {
             SpringBeanAutowiringSupport
             .processInjectionBasedOnServletContext( 
                 this, getServletContext()
             );
         }
     %>
     

3. Try a different VM. WTP editors creates huge amounts of objects and now all VMs (GC implementations) can handle that equally well. If you use Sun's Java, try JRockit or IBMs J9. Also play with the GC settings. Increasing RAM won't help because if you have GC issues, more RAM usually only makes it worse (since the GC will have to process more data).

4. Precompile as much code as possible. You don't need 4000 classes open at all times on your workspace. Cut your huge project into manageable chunks.

5. Replace JSPs with plain Java servlets and use HTML rendering libraries like rendersnake or use a programming language which plays more nice with HTML (like Groovy).

6. Get some decent hardware. A new PC with a quad core and 8GB RAM costs $1000. If you save ten minutes every day, the investment will be paid up in 50 days (at the rate of 1 person costs $1000/day all in all).

7. Try MyEclipse which has much better web editors. The JSP editor is better than WTP (code completion works most of the time, for example) but it's still sluggish.

Answer 2

WTP (3.2.3) is slow for me too. I belive I have found some ways to make it not so slow:

• We use maven, so there is a target directory which contains a copy of all JSP's and some other XML's. I have recognized that they are sometimes scanned by the WTP validators. But this is not necessary, so I have excluded them from validation (Project/Properties/Validation/XXX/Exclude Group/). (You should be able to gain the same effect when marking the target directory as derived, but that does not work for me some times ;-( )
• I have made the (not scientifically proven) observation, that WTP seems to be faster with JSPX than JSP files.

Answer 3

By far the best way for speeding up my projects has been to precompile code that I am not currently using. We have about 20 projects that make up our system and when working on any specific problem I'm only touching a specific subset of those java files. Compiling most of the code that I won't be touching and throwing it into some .jar's, then using that as the source instead of including the projects has proven to speed up things by quite a bit. I imagine it will help you as well if you have 4k+ files. Each project just has a little build.xml that will make a jar out of it to include.

As for the mind numbing slowness in the JSP editing. I have the same problems, it's just so dam slow. I don't have many more than 100 jsp files but I have the same issues as you. My solution has just been to throw money at hardware, which I must admit I enjoy doing :P.

Answer 4

Couldn't comment so I will just put my comment in to this answer.

Have you tried upping Eclipse's memory allocation, I know it used to crash all the time when I used it on Mac OS X awhile ago. There is a config file that has the base RAM allocation in it, once I modified that file and gave it an extra 128 megabytes of memory it behaved better. Not sure if this will affect WTP, I am commenting more in regards to the core Eclipse application itself.

Answer 5

We have the same problem with WTP 3.2.3 here, too. We use it in our product for several years, too but the acceptance of our developers and customers in this tool is decreasing every year because in every newer release it is slower and slower.

I would like to use it if I could disable all "advanced" features but as you mentioned you cannot disable the indexers at all. Also you cannot stop the validator of JSP files if it is already running (you can test this if you have that many files as you have and we also have around 1000 JSP files and many tag files in our project).

I also can prove that increasing the memory does not help. It only prevents crashes of the whole eclipse but it does not reduce the UI blocking internal operations of WTP.

In the newest version 3.2.3 I got many hangs when I start Tomcat from within the servers view. The UI just hangs about 1 minute. It's not only me who has the hangs, it's all my colleagues who work on Windows have the same problem. On Linux I do not know about this problem.

Also there are problems in WTP when you have no access to the internet. It seems there are request to some registries to download schemas or such things and if you do not have a connection then it just hangs and waits for the time out.

Answer 6

To answer the following question: Do you have some best practices to speed it up, especially for upper-mid-sized like ours?

Turning off validation and auto-building after file-saving is a good start to increase performance.