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Under Windows the property "sun.awt.keepWorkingSetOnMinimize" is false as standard. The Netbeans launcher "nbexec.exe" sets this to true and this property cannot be overrided by startup params (I found no way). This parameter set to true may be o.k. on older and slower computers, but on a new and fast pc are no problems in swapping from virt. memory and netbeans is not slow. The other greater problem is that a platform based user application also has no way to override this parameter and the only way to override this parameter is to patch the nbexec.exe. Can you change the nbexec that the parameter "sun.awt.keepWorkingSetOnMinimize" is overrideable?
-> launcher maintainer
There is still possibility to rebuilt your own version (use cygwin tools). Can you describe better why you think that new and fast PCs have no problems with swapping? IMO if you swap to disk you have a problem even with new HW because disk access is still much slower than RAM access. If you have a lot of memory and the system does not need to swap to disk then you don't need to care about this flag. Unfortunately Java app with a large memory footprint is more sensitive to working set trimming than native applications. I am not telling that this is not valid RFE just want to know how strong are your reasons and whether you can confirm what you have written.
I compared Netbeans with other IDE's like JDeveloper (Oracle), JBuilder (Borland) and Eclipse. All these programs and also other Java applications are freeing the used Operating Systems memory under Windows while minimizing. It cannot be that one programm like Netbeans uses and blocks 20-30% of the whole systems memory. Of course, swapping to memory is faster than to disk, but I cannot find a disadvantage and it is not slow when Netbeans frees memory while minimizing and allocate it when maximizing. Try it out and I believe you can see that there is no problem. My wish is to make this parameter overwritable!! At this moment, Platform based enduser programs also do not free memory while minimizing ant this is the greater problem. Tell me, how should I explain my endusers such a giant memory usage? The enduser said: Java is bad, it is slow and it uses a lot of ram and I need a new and better computer for a simple program and under .NET I don't have these problems. This is the reality!!!
I am not sure if you correctly understand what this flag does. Basically the application is not blocking any memory in OS (like pinning pages). It just gives some hints to OS about good policy how to treat applications resources - when and how much of of application it to swap to disk. Maybe that other IDEs don't do this. For example Mozilla (and supposedly Firefox) did the same trick. What is a giant memory usage? It seems that the footprint itself can be a problem rather than the way how it behaves when minimizing app. This flag is not about freeing memory like doing GC and/or shrinking/growing heap size.
Maybe I do not know this flag in detail but in overview I think. But this is not relevant for me. The effect is important. And the effect is, that Netbeans do not give used memory free, when it is not used. Is is seen in the task manager. Mozilla is also such a "memory eater" like Java and Netbeans is extremly in this case. Or how should I describe 250 - 300 MB memory in ram and the same again in virtual memory? This is giant for me. Of course, this flag is not a "memory freeing flag" but it can give a step to a more tolerably Java application. I also cannot understand the steady increasing memory usage of Netbeans. Is there a generally memory leak in Netbeans, or is this a Java problem? Do I have to expect the same in my applications? Java is an excellent and efficient language, but the memory management is terrible and inefficient.
Mostly performance related. Passing to Petr N.