Wondering how much heap is used by Eclipse? Using the menu Window > Preferences there is a setting I can enable: “Show heap status“:

Show Heap Status in Eclipse

With this, I see the current status of the heap in the lower right corner of Eclipse: The currently used amount of heap and the maxium of heap allocated:

Heap Status

There is as wall an icon to run the garbage collector manually.

With the status I can watch the memory consumption over time which gives me an indication if I feel that Eclipse is using too much memory.

Happy Heaping 🙂