It would surprise me, as on my Macbook, Eclipse with the default .ini is set to run the JVM with a maximum size of 512M by using the -Xmx512m argument. (I am, however running Eclipse "Classic", maybe the other bundles have larger limits). In fact, it might run a little better if I boosted the amount of RAM available to its JVM.

Maybe someone knows otherwise; but I think it is a fact of life that when you set your JVM to use (say) 1GB and keep a java app open and creating objects for long enough, it will tend to grow to 1GB rather than spend time running the GC.