Sunday, September 9, 2012

A trick to help with the Eclipse update blues

I think anyone who uses Eclipse has cussed at the software installer/updater/marketplace.  Tonight I tried to install the eGit plugin from the marketplace with no luck.  As usual, every time it tried to download something from download.eclipse.org, usually content.jar, it would hang until the 600s network timeout elapsed.

I did a little googling and stumbled upon a JVM setting that fixed the problem in this instance.  Crack open the eclipse.ini and throw this parameter into the -vmargs:

-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

After doing that the updates worked great.  All the network communication went by quickly on my cable modem and I wasn't sitting there wondering what the hell Eclipse is doing.  I can live with slow downloads when I can see progress going by but the 10 minute hangs with no feedback...

For what it's worth, the other trick I saw that people found helpful was to go to the 'Install New Software' screen and uncheck the 'Contact all update sites during install to find required software' check box.  That didn't help my issue, the JVM parameter is what did the trick there, but it's worth keeping in mind if updates are mis-behaving.

Any who, maybe this will help someone else out with Eclipse downloads.

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