I had to write an eclipse plugin some time ago. I just can't live without TDD. TDD with eclipse plugins is a pain in the neck because of eclipse startup and execution times. In my old development machine (a PIV 2.2Mhz notebook), the entire test suite takes 125 seconds to run. After weeks of intensive development I figured I had two options either buy a faster workstation or go nuts.

I bought myself a AMD64 3200+ workstation.

Here's the time figures for the different development environments I tried:

Notebook, Windows XP Home, Eclipse 3.1, jdk 1.5.0_01 (client vm): 125.7s
Workstation, Windows XP Pro, Eclipse 3.1, jdk 1.5.0_01 (client vm): 57.8s
Workstation, Windows XP Pro, Eclipse 3.1, jdk 1.5.0_01 (server vm): 61.3s
Workstation, SuSE 9.2 64bit, Eclipse 3.1, jdk 1.5.0_01 64bit (server vm): 61s
Workstation, SuSE 9.2 32bit inside VMWare running on SuSE 9.2 64bit, jdk 1.5.0_02 32bit (client vm): 59.2s

I find absolutely amazing that running eclipse inside a 32bit SuSE 9.2 VMWare under SuSE 9.2 64bit runs at the same speed of eclipse under Windows XP Pro.

These VMWare guys really know what they are doing.

Quick update: I've just tried running the smae SuSE 9.2 32bit inside a VMWare running on Windows XP Pro 64bit and the full test suite took only 57s!!!! So it seems that I've finally found my development enviroment setup.