Is it normal when running Eclipse Helios, Javaw consumes a lot of RAM?

Question

Possibly this is a recurrent subject here:

After reading some answers on stackoverflow regargind Eclipse Helios performance and made a bunch of tweeks on its .ini, it is still consuming too much memory and make my computer even slower.

Here is a screenshot of Task manager, without doing nothing on Eclipse Helios (just run it):

My system configuration: Intel Core2 Duo P8400 @ 2.26GHz, 4.00GB RAM, 65-bit Operating System, 31 GB free on Hard drive. Windows 7 Ultimate SP1. Java SE 7 installed.

The only active processes doing something: chrome (80 MB 5% CPU)

When running a simple Android application emulator-arm.exe is eating 607 MB.

My Eclipse ini file:

-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.1.R36x_v20101122_1400.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_64_1.1.2.R36x_v20101222
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms128m
-Xmx384m
-Xss2m
-XX:PermSize=128m
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m
-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=10
-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=70
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:+CMSIncrementalMode
-XX:+CMSIncrementalPacing
-XX:CompileThreshold=5
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote

Question: is it normal for Javaw to consume a lot of RAM? (Also my computer seems "to hang" during Eclipse Helios launch).

And another one: Any suggestions to improve my performance? Use Linux? :-D

Answer 1

300+ MB seems completely normal for running Eclipse or any other IDE. I don't think you should try limiting it to 256M or whatever. You got 4 gigs of RAM, right?

65-bit Operating System seems a bit odd (!) though.