Workday Studio has been slow as heck on the Windows computer at my current company. It has been particularly slow at dealing with large XML files.

When I check the task manager in my computer, Studio isn’t using nearly as much memory as I have available… why?

Well, turns out, there are some setting you can change.

I don’t know yet if this really make a significant difference or is worth the effort. Big XML files still crash after the change. I can see the additional memory usage in Task Manager, but otherwise, shrug.

Default settings

If you can dig up the installation location of Workday Studio, somewhere in there is a file named eclipse.ini. There’s a whole lot of stuff in there, but there are a few important lines:

-Xms512m
-Xmx4096m

• -Xms512m means Studio starts with 512 MB of memory.
• -Xmx4096 means Studio maxes out at 4 GB of memory.

New settings

With a modern computer, you could try out some more aggressive settings:

-Xms2g
-Xmx8g

• -Xms4g: Changed from 512m to 2g. Studio will now take 2 GB at launch.
• -Xmx8g: Changed from 4096m to 8g. This doubles the max ceiling to 8gb. If you have 32 GB+ of ram, you could even try 12 GB with -Xmx12g.