How to improve Netbeans performance?

Question

Is there a real way to get Netbeans to load and work faster?

It is too slow and gets worse when you have been coding for some time. It eats all my RAM.

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Answer 1

I had big problems with NetBeans 8.0.2. It's an old question but perhaps somebody else will end up here like me with the same problem, and I found no answer that helped me anywhere.

I have NetBeans 8.0.2 with Ruby on Rails plugin, on Windows 7. The IDE was hanging up to 10 seconds on almost every change I did in some files. It was problem only with big files, but it must depend on more than that, there were other big files without the problem.

The problem was caused by the "hint" "Rails 3 Deprecations", I turned it off and now it's very fast, I can have everything else turned on without problems.
It's under Tools -> Options -> Editor -> Hints.

There is also some suggestions in the other answers of optimizing with startup parameters. I found these links about JVM-switches that helped me when testing to optimize (but it turned out that these settings have nothing to do with my problem), they are very old but have some useful information:
Explanation of JVM-switches.
Some (old) recommendations