Android – LogCat Stops Running in Eclipse Needs Restart

The three most influential factors for Eclipse speed are:

• Using the latest version of Eclipse (2020-06 as on 26 June 2020)
  Note that David Balažic's comment (July 2014) contradicts that criteria which was working six years ago:

The "same" workspace in Indigo (3.7.2) SR2 loads in 4 seconds, in Kepler SR2 (4.3.2) in 7 seconds and in Luna (4.4.0) in 10 seconds. All are Java EE bundles. Newer versions have more bundled plugins, but still the trend is obvious. (by "same" workspace I mean: same (additionally installed) plugins used, same projects checked out from version control).

• Launching it with the latest JDK (Java 14 at the time of writing, which does not prevent you to compile in your Eclipse project with any other JDK you want: 1.4.2, 1.5, 1.6 older...)

    -vm jdk1.6.0_10\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll
  

• Configuring the eclipse.ini (see this question for a complete eclipse.ini)

    -Xms512m
    -Xmx4096m
    [...]
  

The Xmx argument is the amount of memory Eclipse will get (in simple terms). With -Xmx4g, it gets 4 GB of RAM, etc.

Note:

1. Referring to the jvm.dll has advantages:

• Splash screen coming up sooner.
• Eclipse.exe in the process list instead of java.exe.
• Firewalls: Eclipse wants access to the Internet instead of Java.
• Window management branding issues, especially on Windows and Mac.

Dec. 2020, Udo conforms in the comments

From version 4.8 (Photon) an up there was a steady speed gain after each version.
The main platform was optimized every release to load faster, enable more features for the dark theme and to add more features for newer Java versions for the Java development tools.
Especially with-in the last 3 versions the startup time was increased a lot. There should be a significant increase in start-up time with the newest version of Eclipse 2020-12.

In my experience it started a lot faster with each new version.
But: There are still plug-ins which do not follow the new way of using the Eclipse API and are therefore still slow to start.
Since the change to Java 11 as the minimum runtime version starting from Eclipse version 2020-09 at least the core system uses the newer features of the JVM. It is up to the providers of the other plug-ins to upgrade to newer APIs and to use the full power of modern CPUs (e.g. concurrent programming model).

Using the Application Class

Depending on what you're doing in your initialization you could consider creating a new class that extends Application and moving your initialization code into an overridden onCreate method within that class.

public class MyApplicationClass extends Application {
  @Override
  public void onCreate() {
    super.onCreate();
    // TODO Put your application initialization code here.
  }
}

The onCreate in the application class is only called when the entire application is created, so the Activity restarts on orientation or keyboard visibility changes won't trigger it.

It's good practice to expose the instance of this class as a singleton and exposing the application variables you're initializing using getters and setters.

NOTE: You'll need to specify the name of your new Application class in the manifest for it to be registered and used:

<application
    android:name="com.you.yourapp.MyApplicationClass"

Reacting to Configuration Changes [UPDATE: this is deprecated since API 13; see the recommended alternative]

As a further alternative, you can have your application listen for events that would cause a restart – like orientation and keyboard visibility changes – and handle them within your Activity.

Start by adding the android:configChanges node to your Activity's manifest node

 <activity android:name=".MyActivity"
      android:configChanges="orientation|keyboardHidden"
      android:label="@string/app_name">

or for Android 3.2 (API level 13) and newer:

<activity android:name=".MyActivity"
      android:configChanges="keyboardHidden|orientation|screenSize"
      android:label="@string/app_name">

Then within the Activity override the onConfigurationChanged method and call setContentView to force the GUI layout to be re-done in the new orientation.

@Override
public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
  super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);
  setContentView(R.layout.myLayout);
}