Yesterday, I had some tough time figuring why my Eclipse Debugger (for Java) was working intermittently. Initially I thought it was due to the recent Eclipse updates I might have installed, and hence, I reverted back to Ganymede from Galileo. It still didn’t work. The next guess was workspace corruption so I deleted and rebuild the entire workspace, but to no avail. After a lot of futile efforts and after wasting 3 hours on the same, here is what I got.

Eclipse Debugger with Sun JDK 1.6.0_14 is broken. The problem occurs on Windows and Linux platforms. This is an issue with the JVM and not the Eclipse Debugger. The workaround is to use the -XX:+UseParallelGC VM option. For those interested in knowing more details on the bug can refer to this Eclipse Bug.

For me, I upgraded my system to Sun JDK 1.6.0_18 and am back running on Galileo.

Hope this helps!