Find out what JVM Eclipse is running on

Question

I\'m currently trying to tune my Eclipse installation and bumped into the \"-vm\" option. Other posts on SO mentioned that it\'s good to always use the latest JVM available

Answer 1

According to this thread and this one:

eclipse will try to locate your JVM used for launching itself by examining your path.

So, you can:

• Create a JAVA_HOME environment variable, that points to your actually preferred JDK.
  This way you can easily choose between JDKs installed.

• Put %JAVA_HOME%\bin in the path, anywhere preceeding \system32, which also contains java, javaw & co binaries.
  This way the java* in the JDK bin directory is invoked whenever it is invoked from the path.

I believe the other posts tell you how to find what JVM eclipse is using.

However, I interpreted your question as: "what JVM will eclipse will use when launching itself ?" when no -vm args is used.

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After further research, it appears that eclipse will look for a JRE:

• either directly under its installation directory (\jre): if you copy the content of any installed JRE in that sub-directory, it will be selected
• in C:\Program Files\Java\JRE....
• in the %PATH% (see above)

Also read this SO answer to see why eclipse will by default select jvm.dll instead of javaw.exe