On my Windows 7 - 64 bits workstation, I used the 32 bits version of Eclispe without any issue and recently I decided to try the 64 bits version of JDK & Eclipse. The result is that I now have frequent UI freezing and java heap space errors, and no visible performance improvement.
Is this a common issue ? Why don't I actually get better performance using 64 bits eclipse ?
I use 64-bit Eclipse and JVM and my performance has improved. Of course, most of the performance gain came from increasing the heap space from 2 GB to 4 GB.
As for your problem, frequent freezing and heap space errors indicate that you need to increase your heap space using the -Xmx and -Xms options in your eclipse.ini file. Your advantage in using 64-bit Eclipse and Java is that you now can make your heap bigger than 3 GB, if you have enough RAM in your machine.
I remember having some problems with the 64 bits version of Eclipse as well so I just decided to switch back to 32. In my case I don't remember any noticeable performance advantage either.
