Eclipse webtools project (WTP) and its performance / quality

Our company is using eclipse since several years now (we are using WTP since release 0.7)

I am currently evaluating eclipse 3.6.2 with WTP 3.2.3 which should replace eclipse 3.4.2 with WTP 3.0.4 as being our main IDE.

And I have to say that once again I am quite disappointed in concerns of performance:
WTP 3.2.3 seems to be much slower than 3.0.4.
In fact I am really wondering why WTP gets slower with each release.

One of our applications (dynamic web project) contain about 4000 java classes and 700 jsps/jsp fragments. We only need basic WTP functionality for developing jsps, xmls and xsd. We don't need high sophistic features like Dali (should JPA tools really covered by a webtools project?), Libra or a visual xml editor in the first place.

Another interesting point is that WTP seems to slow down the whole IDE. SWT is non-reponsive for some fraction of seconds, cpu usage is very high (especially after a built took place - if you look at the system jobs, several jsp/javascript indexers are doing work for some minutes, even if all WTP build validators have been disabled), opening new files are slower, navigating through the project etc.

This can be especially seen on older machines which do contains only a single core cpu.

The worst thing is that I've got the feeling that the WTP dev team does not care much about performance (e.g. have a look at the http://wiki.eclipse.org/WTP_Performance_Tests page - last update took place in 2008).

Bug reports and Newsgroup posts regarding to performance of basic features (e.g. jsp editing/validating) are often ignored or closed after some time, some examples: here, here, and here.

Quo vadis, WTP?

Please don't get me wrong:

I don't want to blame WTP.
In fact I believe that WTP is a good open-source project developed by a talented team.
But obviously the project has a problem with its quality assurance, especially in terms of performance which affects usability and user acceptance.

I just want to point out that the team should focus on the things which are essential to most of the users in the first place and afterwards work on implementing super-duper-features.

My Questions

• What are your experiences with WTP, especially the most recent releases?
• Can you confirm or disprove my observations?
• Are there better alternatives?
• Did you switch from or to WTP and why?
• Do you have some best practices to speed it up, especially for upper-mid-sized like ours?

UPDATE

I'd like to make an update on this question to reflect the current answers and to sum up the current results:

• Many users complain about more or less on the same issues so I see those issues as confirmed.
  BTW, this question is also mentioned on a news post on theserverside.com with additional comments.

• The responsible WTP project lead, nitind, made a notable post on the current situation of WTP, which I like to cite:
  "The simple fact is that we don't spend much time on performance tests because we lack resources for doing that."
  "Of course we'd like to be proactive about it rather than reactive, but we tend to allocate our time to functional problems first."
  

So this question turns a little bit into some kind of an open letter from the community to the WTP team:

Dear WTP team,

it's obvious that WTP is suffering from major quality/performance issues 
which you try to play down or to ignore.
Please invest some time to improve the current situation 
at the cost of new features and do everything what's required 
to solve the current problems.
E.g. revive the performance team, do some regression tests between 
previous releases or ask the community for (precise defined) help.

I am sure that they are enough people willing and able to help here.

If you like, do some kind of poll to get a feeling what should be 
the most important scopes of future's WTP releases.

Please, please, listen to your community.

Solution 1:

To respond, I'm the lead for the projects that supply the JSP, XML, and JavaScript source editing functionality in WTP. The simple fact is that we don't spend much time on performance tests because we lack resources for doing that. Of course we'd like to be proactive about it rather than reactive, but we tend to allocate our time to functional problems first. We do have an adopter product running performance regression tests regularly, but I expect that tests are run on multi-core machines by now--and we haven't had any new red flags reported to us for some time.

Of the 3 bugs you linked to, 2 predate the 3.0.4 version you laud and the third is either a formatting performance issue (since addressed) or one with as-you-type validation specific to XML files (the fixing of which would have triggered a memory leak in Xerces, iirc, hence us not putting it in at that time). If you have concrete projects that you can attach to a bug and say "doing X is slower in 3.2 by Y amount", we'll do what we can to figure out where there's a regression.

As for the indexers, they should at least eventually complete. The on-disk information that is stored has changed between WTP versions, and those files need to be reprocessed so they're again included in search and (where implemented) refactoring operations. Once the initial indexing is complete, it should act incrementally and be virtually unnoticeable. One architectural change you may be running into is that for JSPs, the entire workspace needs to be indexed in a single workbench session for that index to be considered "up to date". Shutting down Eclipse out of frustration will only prolong the impact of that reprocessing.

It sounds like your company's standard install includes the entirety of WTP rather than rolling your own custom distribution. I urge you to check the Startup and Shutdown preference page and turn off early startup of any functionality you're not interested in using. Nothing you've mentioned interest in makes use of that facility, but there are other areas of WTP and the Platform that do. Anything you're not interested in validating is fair game on the Validation preference page, as well as the setting to validate JSP fragments by default on the Web / JSP Files / Validation preference page.

Solution 2:

We have the same problem with WTP 3.2.3 here, too. We use it in our product for several years, too but the acceptance of our developers and customers in this tool is decreasing every year because in every newer release it is slower and slower.

I would like to use it if I could disable all "advanced" features but as you mentioned you cannot disable the indexers at all. Also you cannot stop the validator of JSP files if it is already running (you can test this if you have that many files as you have and we also have around 1000 JSP files and many tag files in our project).

I also can prove that increasing the memory does not help. It only prevents crashes of the whole eclipse but it does not reduce the UI blocking internal operations of WTP.

In the newest version 3.2.3 I got many hangs when I start Tomcat from within the servers view. The UI just hangs about 1 minute. It's not only me who has the hangs, it's all my colleagues who work on Windows have the same problem. On Linux I do not know about this problem.

Also there are problems in WTP when you have no access to the internet. It seems there are request to some registries to download schemas or such things and if you do not have a connection then it just hangs and waits for the time out.