Eclipse package in Ubuntu Dapper depends on the GNU Java bytecode interpreter (gij-4.1) and the performance is extremly bad, is very heavy. Nowdays there are official Ubuntu packages for Sun JDK (sun-java5-jdk) and the performance is obviously greather, the difference is really important, so I downloaded the Eclipse binary package from eclipse.org and I’m using it with Sun JDK (just apt-get).
Now I can write code without wait a few seconds or minutes between every carriage return in the source editor.
Another way to improve the performance is to use Netbeans 5, because it is much lighter than Eclipse and is better to do some task like gui applications design.
I use NetBeans to create and manage Swing forms and Eclipse to write the code.
