Stop Slow Eclipse and MyEclipse Startups on Windows 10

Microsoft’s Windows Security has been making Eclipse/MyEclipse startup very slow, but Windows allows you to add exclusions for trusted applications and bypass the scan for a faster startup. This is how you Stop slow Eclipse/MyEclipse startups on Windows 10.

Note: The techniques discussed in this article will apply to all Eclipse-based IDEs, like Angular IDE, Spring Tool Suite and Red Hat Developer Studio.

As you can see in the next screenshots, the idle Windows Defender CPU usage is barely noticeable; however, when opening Eclipse/MyEclipse, it suddenly starts using a lot of resources, making the startup slow for most users.

CPU before starting Eclipse

Thanks to Windows Defender the CPU usage increases from 15-20 percent.

CPU after starting Eclipse

The good thing is that Windows Security allows adding exclusions to certain processes and directories that we trust, so we can exclude Eclipse/MyEclipse and bypass the scan.

Fix Automatically
CodeMix 2019.9.18 can make the folder exclusions to Windows Defender automatically, so if you have this or a later version installed, you could choose to have CodeMix make the changes instead of following the steps below.

If you don’t have this version of CodeMix, or wish to make the changes manually, here is a list of steps to add exclusions to Windows Security. This process shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes and will save us a lot of time in the future.

Manual Steps:
Open Windows Settings, either by right-clicking the Start icon on the taskbar and selecting Settings or by typing Settings on the Start Menu.
From Windows Settings, select Updates & Security.Windows Settings
On the left sidebar, select Windows Security.
From Windows Security, under Protection areas select Virus & threat protection.Windows Security Panel
Inside Virus & threat protection settings, select Manage settings.
Virus & threat protection settings
On Virus & threat protection settings, scroll down until you see Exclusions and select Add or Remove exclusions. Exclusions
Select Add an exclusion then select Folder.
We will need to select the directory where we have installed Eclipse/MyEclipse, also the folder containing our Workspaces.
There is also another set of directories that should be excluded in case we have them, these directories are:
Folder

Default Location

Git folder

/git

Gradle folder

/.gradle

CodeMix Extensions

/.codemix-store/extensions

CodeMix Storage

<user.home/.codemix-store

M2E Repository

/.m2/repository

This will fix the long loading times, and decrease the CPU load, making a faster and better experience for us. Whatever distribution of Eclipse you use, I hope this mini-guide helps improve your experience.