Amped and Wired

For the last few days Eclipse has been doing a full rebuild every time I save a file. It slowed my development to a crawl; I have a huge number of projects in my workspace, and rebuilding them takes too long!

Scouring the net left me no closer to a solution. It seems to be a relatively common problem, but different people find different solutions… none of which worked for me. Eventually I found a post that described how to at least debug the problem:

1. Create a file called “.options” the same directory as your eclipse executable with the following contents:

org.eclipse.jdt.core/debug=true
org.eclipse.jdt.core/debug/builder=true

2. Start Eclipse with the command line “eclipse -debug .options”. This will result in a console window running along with Eclipse where you can see debug log output. Save a file and see if you can see anything suspicious in the log.

Eventually I found these log messages:

Missing delta for: environment
Performing full build since deltas are missing after incremental request

No idea what they mean really, but “environment” was a “General” type project and was set up as a dependency of one of my other Java projects. Removing this dependency fixed the problem. Weird.