Speed Up Spring Tool Suite Startup Time

  • 4/5/2011
  • One-minute read

Spring Tool Suite (STS) can feel sluggish on boot because of background tasks launched by default. The two tweaks below shave several seconds off startup time on older hardware and keep the IDE responsive.

Disable Unused RSS Feeds

  1. Navigate to Preferences → Spring → Dashboard.
  2. Remove the default RSS feed URLs or untick automatic feed refresh.
  3. Apply changes and restart STS to confirm the dashboard no longer loads remote content on startup.

Pause Maven Index Updates

  1. Open Preferences → Maven → Download repository index updates on startup.
  2. Clear the checkbox to prevent STS from fetching Maven Central indexes every time it boots.
  3. Trigger index updates manually when you actually need new artifacts (Window → Show View → Others → Maven Repositories).

Additional Tips

  • Keep the workspace lean by disabling unused Spring, Maven, or Cloud perspectives.
  • Allocate more heap to STS in STS.ini if you work with large projects (-Xms1g -Xmx2g is a solid baseline).
  • Monitor the Progress view on first launch after changes to ensure no long-running jobs remain.
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