Minecraft and Terraria both run incredibly slow on my machine. I've never seen anything like it, javaw.exe hammers my cpu – it's constantly at 100%. These aren't even graphically intensive games, they both use java, so I suspect that to be the reason.
I tried setting low render distance, 3D anaglyph to off, graphics to fast, but still minecraft became unplayable.
I uninstalled all previous versions of java and installed the latest version: jre7. I even tried running minecraft in very low resolution and it still killed by cpu. Reinstalling minecraft and java hasn't worked.
I've checked that nothing else is running, anti-virus autoscan is off.
I've managed to run hl2, portal, cod4, san andreas and other recent 3D games just fine, so it's very frustrating.
My specs:
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
1 GB RAM
NVIDIA 5600 64MB
Windows XP
Best Answer
You could try and tune javaw. To begin with i assume you run it like this :
To add parameters for tuning, it should then look like this :
The above example allocates 256 MB heap memory for Java.
Further examples can be found in the Java Tuning White Paper.
Good luck :)