{HandleArea* Thread::_handle_area} is used to store the Handles allocated during native code execution. The current allocation policy is:

initial allocation = 1 Kilo bytes (see the constant Chunk::init_size in allocation.hpp)
subsequent allocations = 32 Kilo Bytes (see the constant Chunk::size)

The 1KB allocation is too big. See attachments trace.patch, eclipse.handles.log, eclipse.handles.results and sum_trace_handle_allocation.tcl for complete statistics:

You can see 99.9% of the cases we use 33 handles or less, which means instead of using Chunk::init_size, we can safely use 256 bytes for the initial allocation with virtually no performance impact.

The original switch over point is 99.98%, which is only about 0.1% higher than the switch-over point for 256 bytes. 

$ java -XX:+TraceHandleAllocation -jar $ECLIPSE64 2>&1 | tee eclipse.handles.log
$ tclsh ~/jdk/proj/ioisvn/scripts/sum_trace_handle_allocation.tcl < eclipse.handles.log | tee eclipse.handles.results

 count    accum    perc
157934   157934  47.81% Handles    0, Chunks   0
100901   258835  78.36% Handles    1, Chunks   0
 59379   318214  96.34% Handles    2, Chunks   0
  3590   321804  97.43% Handles    3, Chunks   0
  1344   323148  97.83% Handles    4, Chunks   0
     2   323150  97.83% Handles    4, Chunks   1
  1320   324470  98.23% Handles    5, Chunks   0
     1   324471  98.23% Handles    5, Chunks   1
  1305   325776  98.63% Handles    6, Chunks   0
     2   325778  98.63% Handles    6, Chunks   1
   632   326410  98.82% Handles    7, Chunks   0
   628   327038  99.01% Handles    8, Chunks   0
...
   114   329959  99.90% Handles   33, Chunks   0
...
     1   330240  99.98% Handles  108, Chunks   0
     1   330241  99.98% Handles  109, Chunks   1