Bye Bye NetBeans
I really feel sorry writing this but I can't stop myself. I remember my first consulting project that I took up for a financial firm and delivered successfully using NetBeans 3.5. Boy! I just fell in love with that IDE and since then I never looked elsewhere.
I was till last month so much comfortable with the IDE that I simply can't code without it. Its like a brand of your whiskey or a coffee. You are simply addicted, no matter good or bad, you just need it. Nothing else will do.
Its a known fact that NetBeans has been a slow performer. Back then people used to run it on PIII systems with 256MB RAM (running it on a Celeron would surely be a geeky joke). More or less, we all lived with it. We ignored the bad and looked at only the good. Then came better processors and better memories and so called newer NetBeans. Features added, performance improved and the genes of a snail still remained.
For me, its enough now. I fed my Dell Latitude D610 having Pentium M processor @ 1.7gigs and 1GB RAM with NetBeans 4.0 on JSE 1.4.2_11. But that does not sound enough for it. Most of the times it behaves as if it is forced to perfom its duty. Its so damn slow that I dreaded myself to hit on the poor TFT and keyboard. Thank god! my laptop is safe.
Anyway, everyone deserves justice and a chance. I restarted my PC many a times and in case 1GB RAM and 1.7GHz isn't enough for it, I shut all the processes that were not kind of important (including my Outlook). All in vein. May be NetBeans 4 is to blame. So, I installed NetBeans 5.0 (I worked quite a lot with 4.0 earlier but still...) give it a chance. No use :(
Lets not give up. I tried uninstalling everything and downloading a fresh piece of JSE+NetBeans bundle. JSE 1.4.2_12 with NetBeans 5.0. Hoping everything should work well I loaded my projects on this latest version. No price for guessing! I wasted my time.
Now I remain with 2 assumptions and a single conclusion (at least for myself).
Either:
1. It cannot perform properly on a Pentium M processor.
2. NetBeans can no more deliver for the real life development.
If the former assumption is true then I may forgive and forget it and if later is the case, then I have only one thing to say... Altala Vista Baby!!!
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29 Comments:
Why not try with a more recent JRE? It's no secret that they're really improved speed wise, and the JRE version you're running on your laptop doesn't have to match the JRE used in your projects deployment setup.
I'd recommend JRE 1.6beta, since it allows subpixel font rendering under linux.
8:30 AM
Thanks for that suggestion my friend. But it does not really make any sense for me to install all those JREs. If at those were required for NetBeans to behave normally, it should have bundled it alongwith. I can't mess my system's default JRE.
9:43 AM
Hi, did you try to erase your userdir? See:
http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Netbeans/FaqWhatIsUserdir
This can improve the speed of NetBeans significantly. Also make sure to turn off your antivirus, because some antivirus scan all the classes from each jar NetBeans loads. You can specify directories which should be ommited for scanning. Let me know if this helped with the speed at roman dot strobl at sun dot com.
I also recommend to use JDK 1.5, as there are many performance improvements in there. You can install multiple JDKs on your computer and configure in etc/netbeans.conf which JDK you want to use for NetBeans.
10:25 AM
Great to hear something from someone @ sun dot com.
I am still not very satisfied with this answer. Do you believe that NetBeans is of no use on older JDKs? I don't. Something wrong with JDK 1.4.2?
10:31 AM
Hey Roman,
I deleted the userdir. Wanna know what happened? I lost all my settings and imports. I had added some libraries in the library manager. Everything is gone. Anyway, I will still give it a try. Let me see if this relieves me of my pain.
10:42 AM
Sorry I should have warned you about the settings... my mistake.
11:10 AM
NetBeans is of use on JDK 1.4 but we certainly recommend to run it on 1.5.
11:17 AM
I do not mind using JDK 1.5 but I do not want to make it my default JRE. All other apps that use JRE/JDK should not pick up JDK 1.5 as its default compiler/interpreter.
11:26 AM
There were some discussion on similar topics on my blog here:
Cost of installing new JDK
Tiger is no more a Cub
11:29 AM
Install the newest JDK on a spare computer, copy its folder over to your main computer. You now have a working Java 5 that hasn't taken over your system. Point Netbeans at the new folder, and you're good to go.
I'd love to know a better way to do this. I'm hoping the license change will let Sun provide the JDK as a zip/tar. The Java installer is one of the unheralded "[thing] keeping Java from the desktop."
12:54 PM
UPDATE:
Clearing userdir did not help much. It did show a significant performance enhancement the first time I launched it after clearing it, but now it back to (ab)normal. I may try using JDK1.5+NetBeans bundle, but that would only to see if its really the JDK or NetBeans to blame.
Any other tips Roman?
6:52 AM
Do you run any antivirus? Is your hard drive defragmented? Any other software running on background (or a service) which could do some kind of scanning? What exactly is slow?
9:04 AM
antivirus: yes
drive frag: No
other software running fore(back)ground: Yes
what is exactly slow: NetBeans ONLY.
Eclipse is fast, Blackberry JDE is fast, IntelliJ is fast.
Is there any way I can run NetBeans on JDK 1.5 without making that JDK default on my system?
9:40 AM
Totally agree. I have 5yo 950-celeron computer at home and NetBeans 5.0 is not really slow, but a bit slow. And I had to switch to another OS alternative (no flame war) :)
12:05 PM
Hi anonymous, in fact, the thread/blog-post itself started without any intention of flame war or blame game but a concern that may affect the Java development community (using NetBeans) as a whole and that someone from NetBeans could improve upon it if they identify any potential issue.
Try uninstalling your NetBeans 5 IDE and you will be taken to a feedback page (if you are connected to the net) asking the reason for you un-installing it. There you will find one of the Radio Button saying "Slower Performance" (i dont remember the exact words of that Radio but the meaning is to do with slower performance). Does that mean NetBeans is already aware about this ;)
12:55 PM
NetBeans reads a lot of jars on startup. If your antivirus scans each of these calls aggressively, it can slow down NetBeans. I suggest you to try to shut down the antivirus or any other background services and see if there's any difference. You can also disable modules in NetBeans which you don't use. This way you will create a light version of NetBeans. You can find this panel in Tools | Module Manager. Just make sure you don't disable too many things... :) See also:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/roumen/20050520#netbeans_startup_performance_tips
5:21 PM
Frankly, i do not have any kind of performance issues with NetBean 5.0, it runs fine, and i have several project in it. But however, they are not as big as propebly yours are?! I have a 2800+ Sempron and 512MB RAM laptop...
10:11 PM
Hi Roman,
The problem is not with startup but with the normal execution.
This is just one of the typical behavior:
I press down arrow once, try to be a bit patient and thinking I might not have pressed it properly, I press it again and just to be sure I pressed it correct, I press it 2 more times. There it goes... now I am 4 lines below the point where I was. Never mind, I do the reverse again i.e. press up arrow. Same behaviour. Then I try scroll bar. The scroll bar behaves as if it is glued. It does not move and when it does it jumps like a spring.
6:39 AM
One more thing. I am sure no one would appreciate the fact that to run an IDE (or any other software for that matter) a user needs to shut down the anti-virus. Else, what is the whole point in having it?
6:40 AM
You don't have to shut down the antivirus completely - you can just configure which files it should ignore while scanning on background. This can help a lot.
Here's another try. Are you using an ATI graphical card?
See also:
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/faqs/performance.html
7:11 AM
Hi Roman,
Thanks a lot. I disabled POWERPLAY! and I am seeing some performance enhancement. Lets wait for a day more and see if that was the thing.
Thanks,
Goldy.
10:14 AM
Great to see progress :)
6:14 AM
Right.
Thanks for giving my love back :)
NetBeans ROCKS :)
One more thing. Looks like NB 5 has a built in CVS (with a default repository). Any idea how can I use my own CVS repository?
7:37 AM
"Hasta la vista baby", no "altala vista"
11:04 AM
Greetings from Istanbul ;)
See:
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/faqs/#Version_Control_System
If it doesn't help, you can ask me by e-mail.
7:44 AM
NetBeans 5.0 with Sempron 3000+ ,1 Gt ram and it runs
just fine, but my operating system is Linux thou.
11:50 AM
seems you may have a hint now on what's bugging your NetBeans. anyways, mine perform well (NB 5) on Windows and Linux. You should try NB 5.5 beta. You'll fall in love to NB a lot more.
5:50 AM
I agree, NetBeans is slow. JBuilder, e.g. is much more faster when it comes to classpath scanning etc.
If it is necessary to do extended fine tuning to get to a good NetBeans performance then try another IDE, is my advice for all people out there giving massive performance tips where the IDE is expected to work properly by itself.
9:12 AM
> One more thing. I am sure no one would appreciate the fact that to run an IDE (or any other software for that matter) a user needs to shut down the anti-virus.
> Else, what is the whole point in having it?
I've been disabling antivirus scans of my IDEs for as long as I've been doing development. I haven't used Netbeans that much, but Eclipse under VirusScan can take minutes longer to load than Eclipse without VirusScan. Scary stuff.
Alternately, you could move to an operating system that isn't quite as vulnerable to viruses...
5:42 PM
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