Tip for improving Notes startup time from Eclipse

On Tuesday I was contacted by a fellow Yellow-head concerning my Lotusphere 2009 demos and the startup time of Notes from Eclipse. The demos had nothing to do with it – the issue was with his Eclipse setup and was easy to fix.

He was experiencing that it took minutes to launch Notes from Eclipse which made development very frustrating and time consuming. He was using Eclipse configured through Lotus Expeditor Toolkit which made me take special notice as this could be a general problem and something many may/will experience.

After discussing his setup for a while I thought a little about it to tried and think of what could slow down Notes startup. One of the first things I could think of was that he might (inadvertently) be clearing his Eclipse workspace very time he launched Notes. This operation is time consuming and it turned out to be the case. After correcting this he was down to launch times in order of seconds which is also what I experience.

The Eclipse workspace contains all your Eclipse settings as well as a persistent registry of the plug-ins installed on the platform as well as their dependencies. This dependency graph takes a while to put together as it requires reading through all the plug-in manifests and trying to resolve the dependencies specified there. So as you can imagine clearing the workspace before each launch of Notes will take unnecessarily long. If no plug-ins are added to the core platform it doesn’t make any sense to recalculate this dependency graph.

To make sure you don’t clear your workspace when launching Notes from Eclipse do as follows:

1. Open the launch configuration settings (select “RunRun Configurations…” from the menus)
2. Select your Notes launch configuration (probably named “Notes” or similar)
3. On the “Main”-tab take a look at the “Workspace Data”-section at the top. Make sure there isn’t a checkmark in the “Clear” ckecbox. If there is, remove it and apply the changes.
   

That’s all there is to it.