Speeding Up SpringSource Tool Suite (STS)

I'm a big fan on SpringSource's flavor of eclipse (STS), but sometimes it is painfully slow.  Here are some tips on how to speed it up, although it does have the tradoff of automatic validation and some other potential conveniences.

1. Disable validators: Preferences -> Validation: check Suspend all validators
2. Disables Spring validation: Preferences -> Spring: uncheck unwanted validation rules
3. Disable Build Automatically: Preferences -> General -> workspace: uncheck build automatically
4. Disable Maven indexing on startup: Preferences -> Maven: uncheck Download repository index updates on startup

References:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2727040/why-is-springsource-tool-suite-sts-so-slow-and-how-can-i-fix-it
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7189127/sts-spring-with-roo-and-maven-too-slow-tips-and-tricks-needed
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5012567/why-does-eclipse-take-so-long-to-update-maven-dependencies

STS Disable Spring Project Builder

So I'm really a fan of SpringSource's Tool Suite. Everything you need for Java development is all packaged together and it does a great job of keeping my maven downstream projects up-to-date and easily deployed to the dev server. In that sense I love it. However, recently in version 2.9.2 I've been noticing it hanging. I've had to force kill it more than a dozen times and it even drove me to try vanilla eclipse with Tomcat (which drove me back to STS to find out what was going wrong).

Well, I think I've found what is going wrong and a work-around, which unfortunately comes with some inconveniences such as now having to ignore the .externalToolBuilders directory in my SCM.  It appears that the Spring nature in my projects are the culprit for hanging my environment.  Once I disabled the Spring Project Builder everything seemed to run smoother and I haven't noticed any consequences yet.

Here is how to disable the Spring Project Builder: Project -> Properties -> Builders, uncheck Spring Project Builder.  


Or if your IDE is all hung up you can add a file named "org.springframework.ide.eclipse.core.springbuilder.launch" to the .externalToolBuilders directory in that project.