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I have shared your case with the team and would like to share the additional information:
1) First of all, when using older IDL version such as IDL 8.6, you can try to start IDLDE with the below steps to try to workaround the issue:
To be sure everything works fine, please first delete your ".idl" folder which can be found in the user home directory: "/home/user/"
Then run your IDLDE session with the following command:   " idlde -outofprocess "
(This will separate the java process which is running in the background.)

2) The virtual memory is somewhat alarming, but the good thing is that we are sure it’s not actually using that much memory.
However, that can still cause problems, like you are currently experiencing.

First of all, can you please confirm that you're not using an IDL startup script that is pre-allocating a bunch of array space? 

In addition, we noticed that you are using a non-standard system and it might be due to the used kernel and glibc version.
Theoretically, given the right kernel and glibc version, IDL should be able to run.
But you might need to do some tweaking (like that environment variable below) to get IDL to run properly on this specific OS.
We have found a thread on the web, which says that it isn’t Eclipse but could be related to glibc: https://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/t/1082034/

They recommend setting some flag, MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=4.
We have never heard of that but it could be worth trying on this specific system.
Here is another thread that also mentions that same environment variable: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/561245/virtual-memory-usage-from-java-under-linux-too-much-memory-used

Panoply

Panoply plots geo-referenced and other arrays from netCDF, HDF, GRIB, and other datasets. To use its graphical interface make sure you login into albedo via ssh with X forwarding (ssh -X ...). Then run the following commands:

module load panoply
panoply.sh