What does "Computing additional info" mean?

Question

Eclipse Helios periodically starts running a job which displays "Computing additional info". During this time, Eclipse is very sluggish, bordering on unusable. What does this job do? Can I shut it off?

I just hope that someone in the JDT team comes to sense and gets rid of it, make it go faster, or at the very least change it to something meaningful.

Misbelief

what's your eclipse configuration, your machine configuration, plugins you used, and your eclipse.ini content? – Fayina

It's probably just reticulating the splines. – Conformance

Windows 7, Eclipse Helios 3.6M5. Do you want be to send you a list of all the 600 plugins? – Misbelief

of course no... but sometimes disabling Mylyn auto completion is worth a shot (if you in fact installed it -- BTW, that's why I asked). Other possibility is to increase the -Xms and -Xmx parameter in eclipse.ini. It's hard to suggest a solution if the information is not complete. – Fayina

It is not only happen on Helios, it also happen on Galileo. It happens every time I save something into the source code and then the IDE will auto recompile the source. Then the "computing..." operation will be shown. – Shult

Answer 1

Maybe this bug is related: Bug 293856 - [Browser] "Computing additional info" lag during content assist executions

Other than that:

1. Disable the virus scanner for Eclipse files (projects and the folder where Eclipse is installed). On demand scanning can cause severe performance problems with Java's lazy loading.

2. Disable all plugins that you don't need.

3. Give Eclipse more RAM (512MB or more)

4. Put 4GB of RAM into your computer. Costs nothing (

Fastidious

The bug reported seems definitely related. I'll try (1) and (2), but (3) and (4) I already have. – Misbelief

Answer 2

I discovered how you can fix this problem. Go to

Window > Preferences > General > Security > Secure Storage and click on "Clear Passwords"

Roomful

Answer 3

It's computing/caching some information that will make some operations (like auto suggestion) faster.

I can only suggest several things:

• if you installed Mylyn, try to disable the Task-Focused Content Assist
• check the -Xms and -Xmx parameter in eclipse.ini
• try to stop the auto build

Fayina

Frankly, I'd rather have auto-suggestion take a little longer every time, than have to suffer a complete block now and then. – Misbelief