I was running into issues with my Jdev being inadequately slow, hanging, or freezing when working with large BPEL process even though the computer CPU and memory were not even close to maxed out. A little trick I learned in the past to help this problem is increasing the heap size for JDev to use.

To Increase Heap Size

• Step 1 – Open the JDev configuration file located at $JDEV_HOME\jdevstudio10133\jdev\bin\jdev.conf
• Step 2 – Increase the Heap Size by changing the
  AddVMOption -Xmx512M
  To either of these
  AddVMOption -Xmx1024M
AddVMOption -Xmx2048M

Now my JDev only pauses/freezes for up to 20 seconds when trying to use a condition/switch expression builder on these large flows. I believe it is parsing the entire bpel process in the background to display the expression builder. This is only fixed with a faster CPU, as it can’t be handled using my 2X2 processor with 3 GB RAM development environment. Also, a note to Windows users never put JDEV in a path that has a space in it or you will see cryptic errors.