Netbeans and Eclipse over the network
In my current project, I have a test configuration with about 20 Intel servers running Linux ranging from 933MHz PIII (blades) to 2.4/3 GHz P4′s. This configuration is connected to the company LAN with a IPCop router, which hides the multiple servers from the rest of the network.
Now, since my desktop PC is only an elderly 500MHz PIII, I decided
to try how Eclipse and Netbeans would feel over the network and
installed both IDE’s on a 2.4GHz P4. I ssh’ed
into the system, set DISPLAY to my PC and
started Eclipse and Netbeans in turn and loaded some simple Java
code.
The result is, that Netbeans is practically unusable. Even the simple redraws of the IDE screen after it was hidden by another window takes seconds. Also paging in the code is veryyyy slow. The Netbeans installation on my local PC is definitely preferable. Eclipse on the other hand felt quite snappy over the network probably due to the underlying GTK+ implementation of SWT. The processing advantage of the 2.4GHz P4 compared to my 500MHz PC really comes through. I don’t know how it would be with a serious project, but since I’m not a professional programmer and therefore the programming project are quite small, I think it’s really a workable setup for me.
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