Improve your vSphere client's performance

Are you tired of staring at this window?

vSphere Client taking ages to load a VM view

If you manage a vSphere environment with several hundreds of VMs you might notice a disturbing slowness in screen refreshes when you initially look at lists of lots of VMs, try to refresh such views or resort them by clicking on the attributes' columns.

We have been struggling with this for a long time (in fact, since we upgraded to vSphere 4) without ever finding out how to improve or resolve this.
Now I got the tip to look at VMware's KB1029665. It exactly describes this symptom and recommends tuning the Java Memory pool of the Tomcat installation that is used on the vCenter server.

And yes, it got better after implementing this! Don't expect miracles - the first load of the complete VM view will still be slow, but subsequent viewing, sorting and scrolling is faster than without his modification.
However, you need to be aware that this actually changes the memory footprint of the vCenter server. So you might want to review its RAM configuration. Easy, if you have it running as a VM ...