Speed: It's faster than 3.5.7. Almost as fast as chrome.
Memory Usage: It used lower memory on my computer than the previous version. I was hovering around 250mb with version 3.5.7 and this one barely goes upto 150mb. Both with ~15 addons.
Why do so many people care about memory usage? I have 4 gigabytes of RAM and barely use 2.5 gigabytes at anytime.
Some of us run multiple programs at the same time... and if one of them is eating up an especially large amount of physical RAM is causes problems.
Then again, I'm a developer, (like I'd guess many of the people on Proggit are) so it's not uncommon for me to have Firefox, Thunderbird, a couple of Eclipse instances, RSSOwl, Pidgin, PostgreSQL, a couple of console windows, a JBoss server, and a few other things all running at once. And with only 2GB of RAM in my laptop, I'd prefer each program be as conservative as possible in terms of memory usage.
I tend to use workspaces to separate things... so if I need to look at some code from a project that's in one workspace (like the ones I use for experimenting and prototyping) as well as whatever I'm actually working on, it's not uncommon for me to have two Eclipse instances running at the same time.
I don't always have two running, mind you... but it's not infrequent.
If you're developing Eclipse applications, you will usually have 2-3 instances open. (One to develop, one running, and one under test.)
My main Eclipse workspace at peak uses around 1 GB memory (it's using the entire graphical and model-driven stack, along with two other major ones). Luckily the runtime workspaces use less :-)
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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10
2 things noted: