A project I have been working on for several years apparently has gotten so large that the tooltip evaluation of symbols and expressions when in design mode is very sluggish. Despite having a quad core with 4GB of RAM (only 3 GB is relevant since it's Windows XP), when I hover the mouse over code items the tooltip look-ups can frequently take 3 to 7 seconds. Every now and then I hit some part of the code that causes a big hit on the hard drive and those can take up to 15 seconds to complete. I can only assume that the data structures that Delphi uses for symbol tables and other code items involved in tooltip driven look-ups has gotten unwieldy.
I don't want to turn off tooltip evaluation because it is invaluable to my work. Is there a technique or IDE plug-in that could help speed up the tooltip evaluation in the Delphi 6 IDE?
The first thing to try is Andreas Hausladen's DelphiSpeedUp. Frankly, if that doesn't do anything for you there's not much else left to try.
Oh, and for what it's worth, your Delphi IDE will only be able to see 2GB of address space since it is a 32 bit process which does not mark itself as LARGEADDRESSAWARE.