Netbeans scanning issue resolved

I was having problems with Netbeans 6.9 where it would just hang trying to scan my codebase which consists of around ~200.000 PHP files. Another issue was related to code completion and suggestions which caused the IDE to become unresponsive or, in some cases, hang.

It looks like the issue is related to the heap size which is automatically set since version 6.0.

Since NetBeans version 6.0, the default limit for heap size (-J-Xmx) is determined automatically, with respect to the amount of memory available on the system. There is no -J-Xmx option specified in netbeans.conf. However, if you specify the heap size limit (i.e. you add the -J-Xmx... option to netbeans.conf), then the limit given by you will be respected.

http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqSettingHeapSize

So I ended up increasing the heap size in netbeans.conf by adding the "-J-Xmx2048m" option. Here are my current settings:

netbeans_default_options="-J-client -J-Xss2m -J-Xms32m -J-Xmx2048m -J-XX:PermSize=32m -J-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m -J-Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true -J-Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true" 

Although code completion is sometimes slow, my IDE never hangs and completes initial scanning within 2-3 hours.