Slowdown of the Nios® II IDE can be traced back to the Eclipse C/C Development Tooling (CDT) plug-in. One of the functions that CDT provides is indexing capabilities that have been improved in version 3.1.0 of the plug-in. The Nios II IDE version 6.1 uses CDT version 3.1.0 which eliminates many of the performance issues the Nios II IDE once had. The earlier versions of CDT also contained issues editing large include files which caused the Nios II IDE to fail to respond.
To correct these issues it is recommended to upgrade to the Quartus® II version 7.2 software or later. By default indexing is set to “fast indexing” within the Nios II IDE for all new projects. To control the global indexer setting, navigate to the following menu in the Nios II IDE:
Window --> Preferences--> C/C --> Indexer
*Note: This setting is only available in the Nios II IDE version 6.1 and beyond
The indexer is useful for understanding C code and fast symbol searching.
For additional information on the indexer, please refer to the Nios II EDS on-line help.