Speed Up Zend Studio

I’ve been using zend studio for quite some time now, and have found it to be extremely useful. My only compaint with it is that it’s written in java, but I do understand the cross-platform benefits of doing this. I’ve also heard from various people that they have issues with it lagging and crawling along, but never had any issue myself… until today. I just switched jobs, so I naturally needed to install studio on my new workstation. Well, wouldn’t you know, but I became one of those people. I did a lot of searching through many forums and came across many different things to try, but none of them seemed to work. Not being one to give up, I finally found the solution to my problem, and it was baffling to say the least. Oh well, problem solved, and I can get on with my day. However, to save everyone the time that I spent pouring over the forums, here’s a list of all the possible solutions for speeding up zend studio…

Update Java Runtime

This one didn’t solve my problem, but it did seem to do it for many other users (make sure the ide is closed before you try any of this):

• Download JRE6 and install it (make sure you uninstall any previous version you may have).
  Get it here: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/ea.jsp
• Browse to your zend studio folder (typically C:\Program Files\Zend\ZendStudio-5.2.0) and look for a file called “ZDE.lax” in the bin folder. Open it up and look for the line that points to the bundled version of the java run-time that comes with zend:

  lax.dir=C:\\Program Files\\Zend\\ZendStudio-5.2.0\\bin\\

  Comment it out, and change it to the path of JRE6 (this example assumes default installation):

  # lax.dir=C:\\Program Files\\Zend\\ZendStudio-5.2.0\\bin\\
  lax.dir=C:\\Program Files\\Java\\jre1.6.0\\bin

Change Java Heap Size

Again, this one didn’t do it for me, but it helped other people as well:

• As in the previous example, browse to your zend studio folder and open “ZDE.lax” (typically in C:\Program Files\Zend\ZendStudio-5.2.0\bin).
• This time, we’re looking for two directives: lax.nl.java.option.java.heap.size.initial and lax.nl.java.option.java.heap.size.max. We’re going to change these to be the same, and increase the memory. I increased mine to 786mb:

  lax.nl.java.option.java.heap.size.initial=805306368
  lax.nl.java.option.java.heap.size.max=805306368

Change Source Control Settings

This was the fix that worked for me, and it baffles me why. I use subversion for all my work, and it’s installed locally and remotely (depending on the project). This was the only difference between my current workstation, and the one I previously used as well as my home machine. Basically what happens is that if you’re working on/opening/closing a file under version control, zend chokes up. Why? couldn’t tell you. But, changing my version control preference from subversion to cvs did the trick:

• Open your preferences (tools > preferences) and click on the “source control” tab.
• Change the source control tool from subversion to cvs

Zend’s Answer – Turn Off OS Look and Feel

This one seemed to be the “format and reinstall” answer that zend dished out to everyone. Seems very stupid to me, but some people say it helps performance. Open your preferences (tools > preferences) and click on the “desktop” tab, then uncheck the “Use OS Look and Feel” option.

Summary

There were some other mentioned problems, but they seemed relatively isolated. I hope this information is useful, it certainly saved me a lot of headache of trying to figure it out myself. For those of you who still need additional help, here’s the forum thread that I got all this info from: Zend Forum Topic