Eclipse: Slow startup time - eclipse

Question

I've got Eclipse 3.6.1 on my MacBook Air (2010), and I'm getting slowish startup times. Well, slow, compared to my Desktop, which is somewhat less powerful and a few years old).
The startup generally takes 15 seconds, and of this, 4 is spent just on the Eclipse splash screen, before Eclipse loads anything. No projects are open at startup.
Here's a copy of my eclipse.ini.
-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar
--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.1.1.R36x_v20100810
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
512m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-vmargs
-Xms256m
-Xmx512m
-Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6
-Xverify:none
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
-XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled
-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions
-XX:+AggressiveOpts
-XX:+StringCache
-XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods
-XX:+UseLargePages
-XX:LargePageSizeInBytes=4m
-XX:AllocatePrefetchLines=1
-XX:AllocatePrefetchStyle=1
-Dide.gc=true
The problem doesn't seem to be related to plugins - I've disabled the ones which I don't need, and regardless of this configuration or whether all of them are selected on startup, it only takes 1second to load the plugins.
I'm running Eclipse 3.6.1 Cocoa x64 build (vanilla) with the Zend Studio plugin. The machine has 4GB RAM, an SSD with over 64% free space, 1.6GHz (4MB L2 Cache). OS is Mac OS X 10.6.6, latest Java available, 1.6.
For comparison, my Desktop, an old P4 3GHZ (512K L2 Cache) with a 7200RPM drive, under 40% free space, Eclipse (same config) loads in under 7 seconds, consistently. Note, this one is a Windows machine, with latest Java installed.

Answer 1

You use the 64-bit version. Try with the 32-bit version.