Tuning OpenSuse

Dear all,

I’m just an ordinary Linux user that use OpenSuse for programming mainly Java. Now I feel that using IntelliJ IDEA on OpenSuse feels quite heavy (well at least compared to Windoze). I’ve already tuned my JVM and IDEA but sometimes it’s just memory hungry. Is there anything that I can do to tune my OpenSuse to be able to run Java IDE much faster?

My physical RAM is 3GB, and my swap is 2 GB. If I open IntelliJ it would take 1GB of physical RAM. Also my window manager is Gnome. Does anybody has any experience to fine tune Gnome? Does KDE executes faster than Gnome?

Thank you very much for your advise.