Eclipse refreshing workspace takes forever

There are a couple of questions/answers on SO that might help you :

• Tricks to speed up Eclipse
• How to speed up the eclipse project ‘refresh’ ; I'm using the filesync plugin suggested there every day, and it's a real pleasure : 10 seconds for an SVN update, instead of 5 to 8 minutes (my files being on a network drive) ; same when launching Eclipse, as it was the "project refresh" that took time, exactly like you described.
• Eclipse optimizations

Maybe those posts will help you at least a bit :-)

If not : can you tell us a bit more about your set up ? Which plugins are you using, how big are your projects, which OS do you use, what kind of computer (CPU, RAM, ...) do you use ...

One thing that will help for sure, is getting more RAM, at least if you only have 1 GB : that's definitly not enough for Eclipse ; in my opinion, 2 GB is the minimum required, if you want to be able to run anything else (browser, mail, whatever, ...) at the same time.

Couple of other ideas include :

• Using sun's JVM ; using the last version is probably a good idea
• Using the latest version of Eclipse, too (For PHP, I've seen great things when switching from PDT 1.x to 2.x, at least)
• Configure your JVM / eclipse.ini properly

Based on my experience, the Refresh Workspace issue is not always related to the number of open projects. In fact I think there are a couple of different reasons why Eclipse hangs itself shortly after UI start-up. One thing one can always try on different Eclipse versions (Indigo, Juno, or Kepler) is to delete the platforms index files. Just run a find command against your workspace metadata directory and remove *.index files found.