I am just curious why it takes so long to switch workspaces in Eclipse. It is annoying that the process takes so long.
Each workspace contains a whole slew of preferences and metadata, in addition to the projects in the folder. When you change workspaces, Eclipse must reload and apply all those settings, open the projects which are "open", and so forth. There are some things that aren't reloaded, but the biggest contributors are reloaded because they need to be reloaded.
If you have a lot of projects in a workspace, you can cut down on the loading time by closing any large projects you don't touch very often. In "Package Explorer" or "Project Explorer" views, right-click the project, and choose "Close Project" from the context menu. This basically tells Eclipse that it doesn't need information on/from those project in memory at any given moment.