Tuning Eclipse on Mac OS X

Taken from my other blog: pwbrewer.blogspot.com

After you downloaded the Eclipse package, decompress it. Locate your Eclipse.app.
Right-click it and select Show Package Contents.
Under Contents/MacOS, locate the eclipse.ini file. Open it with a text editor.
At the end of the file, add two lines:

-XX:+UseParallelGC
-XX:+UseCompressedOops

Save and close the file.

To that I would add the server option to the same file:

-server

And I suggest changing the following settings:

--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Xms64m
-Xmx512m