A large part of the startup time of Eclipse is caused by the overhead of producing stack traces for the about 25.000 ClassNotFoundExceptions that are thrown during startup (a really lame design of the Java class loader causes it to throw multiple ClassNotFoundExceptions for each class that is loaded). Java and .NET exception handling differ sufficiently that I have to do a lot of processing to build a stack trace for each exception that is thrown, and this is pretty expensive. As a test I decided to disable stack trace generation for ClassNotFoundExceptions and this reduces Eclipse startup time to 3 minutes! Note that this isn't entirely comparable to the 7 minute figure from Saturday, because various other things have also changed.
An alternative optimization that I investigated, was to add a hack the ClassLoader and URLClassLoader to reuse the exception object in URLClassLoader instead of throwing a new one, this also saved a significant amount of time. I'm wondering how others feel about this optimization? It consists of two changes: 1)ClassLoader.loadClass() calls ClassLoader.findClassFast(String name, ClassNotFoundException e) which calls ClassLoader.findClass(), 2) URLClassLoader overrides findClassFast and does a check to see if it has been subclassed, if not it calls findClassImpl and passes it the exception object it got from loadClass, if it has been subclassed it call URLClassLoader.findClass which calls findClassImpl with null as the exception object.
We're not there yet, but progress is being made :-)
6:00:08 PM  Comments
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