Eclipse plugin can allocate virtually unlimited amount of resources

[findbugsproject]

Eclipse plugin can allocate virtually unlimited amount of resources

[findepi]

I proposed some allegedly smarted approach in a PR #69.

[iloveeclipse]

Another approach would be to use a fixed thread pool and set the thread priority for the FB threads:

• Introduce new preferences "maxWorkerThreads" and "jobPriotity" for the FB plugin
• Defaults are Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors() and Thread.NORM_PRIORITY
• Let the job code "as is" and do the actual work NOT on the Eclipse job worker thread (we cannot manipulate them because they are reused for other jobs too), but schedule FB jobs on the threads taken from the FB own, limited thread pool (by "maxWorkerThreads").
• The Eclipse FB jobs would be only responsible to show user the progress and allow cancellation
• The real FB worker threads will run with the priority set to "jobPriotity" preference.

I haven't tried this, but this approach should allow everyone to "tune" FB execution in either way (faster but busy loading JVM or slow but nice).

[findepi]

If threads are competing for RAM, I don't think priority helps much. But the ability to manually control "maxWorkerThreads" would indeed help. (E.g. I would set to 3 on my 8-core desktop, as this perceivedly yields results fastest).

I don't know Eclipse internals, so pardon question -- is running FB as a subprocess completely infeasible?

[iloveeclipse]

Sure, all threads running in the VM memory and so competing with each other per definition.
A "subprocess" is not feasible in plain Java (without JNI) - we have either (VM external) processes or (VM internal) threads.

[iloveeclipse]

This project continues development in a new home: https://github.com/spotbugs/spotbugs/

Please do not open new issues here anymore!