While developing for Android on OS X you might notice (read: get really annoyed with) how slow Eclipse is.

Switching tabs took over 10 seconds for example. Luckily I’m not the only one with this problem: turns out that the default settings for Helios and Galileo are not optimal on the latest versions of OS X.

To quote a solution by Yasin Bahtiyar:

If you experience such a behavior you should modify -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion parameter in eclipse.ini and change the value to 1.6 as a workaround. And then it will run perfectly smooth.

I prefer to increase the memory settings also. Here is related part of my eclipse.ini file:

<code>-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
-Xms128m
-Xmx1024m</code>

The eclipse wiki explains where to find the eclipse.ini file on OS X.