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Unfortunately, we notice a significantly worse performance of SWT Designer after our switch from Eclipse 3.5.1 to Eclipse 3.6.1. To open the Design page of one of our GUI classes takes the following time: o Eclipse 3.5.1 (SWT Designer 7.6): 33 s o Eclipse 3.6.1 (Eclipse Window Builder 1.0): 2 min 25 s With Eclipse 3.6.1 we also tried out SWT Designer 7.6 and a newer beta version, 1.0.0.r36x20110706, but this made no noticeable difference. Our development workspace consists of several plug-ins and fragments with dependencies between each other, and our typical GUI classes are customer-specific subclasses of classes of our core system which reside in other plug-ins. If we put the subclass into the same plug-in as the superclass, this speeds up the parsing a lot: It takes about 50 s (which is still a lot of time). To remove plug-in dependencies, which are not needed by the GUI classes, achieves further speed improvements. But all of these modifications are not feasible for us; we need the division between core plug-ins and customer-specific plug-ins. We used the YourKit profiler to find out what is going on during the parsing time and noticed that SWT Designer seems to spend a lot of time with searching for resources. It would be great if you could help us in this issue. The bad performance of SWT Designer with Eclipse 3.6 means a significant hindrance for our development, so we quite urgently need your help.
We have not seen any performance issues (or reports form other users) with any recent version of WindowBuilder (or SWT Designer) in any recent version of Eclipse. We will need a great deal more information from you in order to determine whether this is indeed an WB issue (rather than an Eclipse issue) and whether we can do anything about it. At minimum, we need to see a reproducible test case and all associated stack traces. If you have been using YourKit, please send us any relevant CPU snapshots. Also, it is not clear whether the problem you are describing is WB version specific (e.g., a WB regression) or Eclipse version specific (e.g., an Eclipse regression) since you used different versions of WB with different versions of Eclipse. Please try the very latest WB integration build with both Eclipse 3.5 and 3.6 (or 3.7), and let us know whether you see consistent behavior. If it is an WB issue, we would expect it to be equally slow in both Eclipse 3.5 and 3.6. If it is an Eclipse issue, we would expect it to be fast in one version of Eclipse and slow in the other.
Created attachment 201330 [details] simple example to show the performance impact I've made a small project which shows the behavior of the swt designer. If the plugins referenced by the example are not in the workspace, the swt designer opens the files in design mode very fast. If all the referenced plugins are as source-plugins in the workspace, the designer require much more time to switch into the design mode. Because we have more and bigger plugins, our real world examples get much more slower than in the case of the example plugin. But it should be enough to reproduce the performance impact.
Thanks for the example. Are you seeing the same behavior with Eclipse 3.5 and 3.6 (or 3.7)? We need to know whether you are seeing equally slow behavior in both versions of Eclipse or whether this is limited to 3.6.
Please give this a try using the very latest WB build. http://eclipse.org/windowbuilder/download.php
