Eclipse release heap back to system

Question

I\'m using Eclipse 3.6 with latest Sun Java 6 on Linux (64 bit) with a larger number of large projects. In some special circumstances (SVN updates for example) Eclipse needs

Answer 1

Found a solution. I switched Java to use the G1 garbage collector and now the HeapFreeRatio parameters works as intended. So I use these options in eclipse.ini:

-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions
-XX:+UseG1GC
-XX:MinHeapFreeRatio=5
-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=25

Now when Eclipse eats up more than 1 GB of RAM for a complicated operation and switched back to 300 MB after Garbage Collection the memory is actually released back to the operating system.