[teknopaul]

Elipse keeps a complete Java representation of the source code in memory, (not the classes) that's why it can find compile errors before saving. This comes at the cost of lost of RAM, some projects are just too big for eclipse so IntelliJ is your only option. But that eclipse model can be used for lots of cool tricks, you have access to it in the plugin API, so for example you can enforce coding standards before even saving code.

[nradov]

I would argue that if a project can't fit into Eclipse with 32 GB RAM then perhaps the code base has become too large to manage and ought to be split into separate projects with dependencies.

[teknopaul]

In eclipse java code is generally already split into projects, in a workspace, you can close projects to save ram.

When you can get it all in memory, you get the benefits of eclipse refactoring, when you can't you don't.

Ability to write code that is safe to refactor is one of the great things about Java, so it's a shame if you can't benefit from that.