How to speed up IBM WDSC or RDi for faster RPG editing

JULY 2015 Update: I bit the bullet and bought IBM Rational Developer RDi a while ago. It’s a nice step up from the old WDSC client and it deffo runs faster, smoother and supports all the new opcodes that are being introduced to RPG over recent years. I highly recommend RDi to each and every RPG programmer and IBM i Software Developer out there. Having said that – you can also increase the memory usage for RDi to free it up  🙂

In 2011 WDSC7 is the coolest (free) editor for RPG/CL programmers on the IBM i operating system. We know that right? But it’s still annoyingly clunky to use at times, unless you free it up to use some more memory and let it run free… like a gazelle… even if it’s a little bit of a fat bloated gazelle…

WDSC Memory Increase

Increase WDSC memory allocation is as simple as this. Edit the configuration file at C:\Program Files\IBM\SDP70\eclipse.ini and increase the XX:MaxPermSize in eclipse.ini from 512M to something bigger… 1024M? 1512M? 2048M? I use 1512M and it works great so make your INI file look like this:

-vm
C:\Program Files\IBM\SDP70\jdk\jre\bin\javaw.exe
-vmargs
-Xquickstart
-Xms40m
-Xmx768m
-Xgcpolicy:gencon
-Xscmx96m
-Xshareclasses:singleJVM,keep
-Xnolinenumbers
-XX:MaxPermSize=1512M

RDi Memory Increase

RDi config lives in C:\Program Files\IBM\SDP and you can make the same memory size increase:

-vm
C:\Program Files\IBM\SDP\jdk\jre\bin\javaw.exe
-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.3.0.v20140415-2008.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_64_1.1.200.v20150204-1316
-install
C:/Program Files/IBM/SDP
-vmargs
-Xquickstart
-Xms100m
-Xmx1024m
-Xmnx64m
-Xgcpolicy:gencon
-Xscmx96m
-Xshareclasses:name=IBMSDP_%u
-XX:MaxPermSize=1512M
-Xcompressedrefs
-Dcom.ibm.ws.management.event.max_polling_interval=1000
-Xss2m