I have installed Java 7 on my development machine and Eclipse Indigo wouldn’t start up properly. Eclipse sometimes would crash, sometimes it would hang. Looking at the workspace .metadata/.log file shows errors that say
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
Eclipse has an FAQ page about how to increase the permgen size, but I didn’t go this route. I opted to switch Eclipse back to Java 6. I went to eclipse.ini and added the following line
-vm
C:Program FilesJavajre6binclientjvm.dll
I had to add this before -vmargs, or else it didn’t work. Eclipse seems to be back to normal again.
Note: If you are instead looking to add Java 7 development support to Eclipse 3.7, go to the Eclipse update site http://build.eclipse.org/eclipse/java7patch/ and add Eclipse Java Development Tools Patch for Java 7 Support (BETA).
Update 8/5/2011: Please read Java 7 on Eclipse Indigo to see how to run Java 7 code on Eclipse. The Java Tools Patch for Java 7 is no longer available.
You can add -XX:MaxPermSize=512m at the end of eclipse.ini if you wish to keep using Java 7.