In Eclipse, the usual way to add new plugins or extend the IDE is using the menu Help > Install New Software. Same thing for the newly released Freescale Kinetis Design Studio V3.0.0: I add the support for new devices in the Freescale Kinetis SDK from the SDK Eclipse update:

Installing Kinetis SDK v1.2 update in Eclipse

One thing I noticed with this (and all others updates I do) is that they take much time to install. That’s expected if the update needs to be downloaded from the web. But I was wondering why it takes so long even if the files are local?

Thanks to a tip (thank you, Marek!), there is a setting to cut the installation time :-).

The problem is that small check box in the dialog labeled ‘Contact all update sites during install to find required software’:

Contact all update sites during install to find required software

This check box is enabled by default in Eclipse. Well, that option sounds like a good thing: it will check the update sites if there are any other dependencies and will install the needed plugins. However, depending on my list of update sites, the network connection speed and the latency of each site, this will need a lot of time. So my recommendation is to uncheck that box:

Unchecked option to contact all update sites

Anyway, if there are dependency not fulfilled, the setup will detect this in the next step anyway.

In my case, with that option disabled, the installation of the Kinetis SDK was down to 3 minutes from the 4 minutes with the option enabled. So ‘checking all the update sites’ was adding up one minute to the installation time.

Summary

By default, the Eclipse updater is checking and contacting all other update sites. Disabling that option can speed up the installation process. The savings are depending on the number of update sites and the latency of each site. As the update process itself would flag missing dependencies, it is save to disable that option in the dialog.

Happy Installing 🙂

Links:

• Other useful tips about update/installation process in Eclipse: Ten Tips for Installing Plugins in Eclipse (Galileo)