Invariant Properties

I love eclipse (and myeclipse) but it occasionally gets into a dark space where it hangs on startup. We’re talking an hour+ with no apparent progress although jconsole/jvisualvm shows that there’s something going on.

“eclipse –clean” doesn’t fix the problem. Rebooting doesn’t fix it. Googling offers some good advice but again it doesn’t fix the problem.

Brad Howerter found the solution. There’s a “.settings” directory under each project. It’s just a cache and can be nuked. Problem solved.

I think what’s happening is that the permissions on one or more files is getting screwed up somehow. The file is marked read-only, it has a persistent OS lock, something. Eclipse tries to do the right thing by retrying but there’s no sanity check to give up (with decent explanation!) after multiple failures. Instead it keeps trying and the application appears to hang. I have no idea why those permissions would be screwed up in the first place though.