I have been using SQL Developer in lieu of DbVisualizer and Toad for the past year for no other reason that it is free. It is pretty handy and does the work quite well if you’re working with an Oracle database, but it’s been giving me a lot of hassle lately.
After some time, it takes quite an awful lot of memory… Making its use impossible, but also making the whole machine an absolute nightmare to work with. Here is a snapshot I’ve taken yesterday:
As you can see, SQL Developer takes more than 600k of RAM, and takes CPU resources for quite some time, whilst Eclipse is living happily with 300k.
The only solution is then to kill the process and restart it… To me, that sounds like a memory leak, and should be addressed quite quickly because it makes the application totally unusable.