Come to find out that a bug that was initially reported in 2008 is still wreaking havok, namely that gtk+ hangs when looking for network printers using CUPS. This is significant because it doesn't just affect eclipse, but has also been reported to affect firefox, openoffice/LibreOffice, and other applications where you would want to print.
If you want to confirm that this affects you, start eclipse with the following arguements:
eclipse -vmargs -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.disablePrinting
then, open and close files in eclipse and observe performance. For me, files were taking approx 10-30 seconds to open, and up to 30 seconds to close, for *every file*. Running with this option dropped the open/close time to <= 5 sec per file.
Since this impacts more than just eclipse, I wanted to make sure this was resolved on my system. The best workaround I have found is the following, mentioned at the debian bug report listed below. Steps are as follows:
- sudo vi /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
- comment out "Listen /var/run/cups/cups.sock"
- sudo vi /etc/cups/client.conf
- add "ServerName 127.0.0.1"
- sudo service cups restart
after this, I was able to open eclipse as normal, without the -vmargs argument and without the delay in opening/closing files. Less time waiting on the computer, more time being productive. :-)
see the links below if you are interested in the nitty gritty.
debian bug report that lists work around:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=594997
eclipse bug report of the issue with the eclipse vmargs workaround
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=275072
linked eclipse bug with more info:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=215234
eclipse faq entry with short discussion of issue:
http://www.eclipse.org/swt/faq.php#printOnGTKHangs
