i am using the eclipse platform for development running on top of a typical mandrake 9.1 distro. for some reason, eclipse seems to slow down significantly after a while of usage.

i observed the CPU and mem to see where the culrpit was. turns out that memory was always used anyway so i turned to the cpu monitor. but that doesn't show any significant signs of activity to make the system run slow.

the other apps running seem to having the same effect while using java.

does anybody have any ideas to optimize the performance of java? or maybe eclipse in particular?

Which JDK version are you using? You might want to check to see if there are any known memory leaks or issues with the garbage collect.

java version "1.4.1_01"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-b01)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-b01, mixed mode)

this is the latest i suppose. until 1.5 goes out...

You could try 1.4.2. I don't know if that will help.

Remember that Java is garbage collected. Memory usage will continues to grow until it is not allowed to grow further. Then a slow garbage collection is needed. Try to measure the allocation rate to be sure.