At home, where I do most of my experimental development, I have a fairly substantial machine. It's windows, but don't hold it against me. It performs like a mofo. 64-bit, 4GB memory, Core2. At work, I have 32-bit, 2GB memory, Core2. I run Eclipse 3.3 with tons of plugins. I generally run eclipse from the command line with 512M heap, using the jdk1.6 JVM So imagine my surprise when I start getting OutOfMemory errors from eclipse at home. I traced it to the JBoss plugin, but couldn't figure out for the life of me why it was causing this behavior. I wasn't actively using any of the functionality in the plugin at the time I'd get the errors. I turned off auto-activation at startup for the jboss and a handful of other plugins, but to no avail. And this was getting in the way of me getting stuff done. Eclipse "manage configuration" is a flaky piece of shit, so disabling suspect plugins didn't work. Thus, I did what any red-blooded American would do: wipe out any folders in the plugins/features directories that referenced jboss. It was time for a fresh start. That fixed the memory problems and let me get back to work. But honestly.... could you live with that answer? I couldn't. So off I went. I asked the interwebs, and after nice traipse through various newsgroups and wikis and bugtrackers, I stumbled on a fix. Ooooooh, what a maddening f*cking fix. Here's the bottom line: my memory troubles went away when I added this to my startup file: -XX:MaxPermSize=256m That's all. By the way, here's where I ended up: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=92250. If you're interested, that bug explains pretty well why I was hitting the memory issues I had. It doesn't explain why it was JBoss plugin causing it... but right now, I don't care. I also installed the memory monitor plugin attached to that bug. It's no better than what you get from jconsole, but marginally more convenient than attaching eclipse to a jmx session and typing "jconsole". So, if you're getting OutOfMemory errors while running eclipse, and increasing the heap isn't cutting it (-vmargs -Xmx512M), it's possibly not a heap problem but a permgen problem. --marc