Hi,
Recently I have been having trouble debugging in Eclipse. I an writing a Java Applet and testing it using Eclipse's Applet Viewer but when I attempt debug mode it sometimes causes my GUI to freeze. I am able to break out to the prompt using ctrl-alt-f1 and restart the gui, but that's annoying because I then have to restart all the apps running on it.

Eclipse (Galileo)
Java JDK 1.6
Ubuntu 9.10 with Gnome 2.28.1

thanks

That *shouldn't* be happening - Eclipse and the 1.6 Sun JDK are both pretty robust.

Do you have enough RAM? Eclipse uses a lot of memory, Java uses a lot of memory ... and Gnome uses an AWFUL lot of memory. I'd strongly recommand at least 1GB RAM.

Try running "top" in a command window when you fire up Eclipse and the JDK debugger. If you use any more than "0" bytes swap ... then you absolutely need more RAM.

Otherwise, if swap stays "zero" and it still hangs, then we need to look elsewhere. Perhaps run a memory checker on the RAM that you already have (perhaps there's a hardware issue with your RAM)?

'Hope that helps .. PSM

I am encountering this same problem, using Eclipse 3.6.1 Build M20100909-0800, JDK 1.6.0_23, and Linux Xfce 4.4.2.

The entire OS freezes; not sure if the same is happening to the OP. The mouse works but the OS does not respond to it. The state requires a reset with Ctrl-Alt-Bksp.

This happens randomly while debugging; I can use debug for ages without issue and then in specific places it will suddenly freeze. Running the same sequence after rebooting and same breakpoint causes the freeze to occur again.

This is unlikely to be a memory issue. I have plenty of memory (1.3G free when Eclipse is running), and the freeze occurs with very little application memory load, and does not seem to occur more frequently with heavy loads.

Think this is an Eclipse bug of some sort... any ideas or pointers would be useful.

Thanks so far - I will look into the memory.
I do have a nicer way out then mentioned before -
ctrl-alt-f1 to the command prompt,
ls -a to find the java process (Eclipse is a java process)
kill -9 (the pid of the java process)
ctrl-alt-f7 back to the gui

that way I only kill the offending application, the GUI starts responding again, the rest of my applications are able to continue.

Reported this as a bug here:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=342075

..which includes a Java thread dump.

Thanks for the workaround, mericet. Very useful