Feature Request: make indexing less blocking and intrusive
Indexing in IntelliJ is a massive pain point for me. The project I am working on is rather large, 600+ maven modules, also a lot of JS/typescript code. When firing up the IDE it takes the better part of five minutes before you can even lift a finger. Meanwhile the IDE is locked into indexing, pretty much preventing any meaningful work. If I quit the IDE and start it again, it repeats the same process all over again, without ANY changes in the project. I have upped memory to 24GB for IntelliJ now. It can't be lack of memory.
I understand that indexing is central to a lot of functions in IntelliJ, but can't you work towards making it less intrusive? Why go through the whole shebang every single time the IDE starts? The whole project, every single time? Why not use the indexes you have and run something less heavy and intrusive in the background? At least let a man work!
Consider this a feature request for making indexing something that is running more transparent in the background and re-use existing indexes when starting up the IDE. I happily take the small inaccuracies that may produce over having a stone tossed in my path every time I start up.
Cheers!
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The IntelliJ IDEA needs to index the project once to provide some essential features like code completion and Go to declaration for each IDEA's major version.
And the IntelliJ IDEA will trigger the indexing again if * there are some new code changes in this project (e.g. git pull, git switch branch) * cache is broken which triggers the reindex (e.g. when forced killed, crash) * due to some bugs.
If the IDEA hasn't finished the indexing, and you reopen it again, it will try to finish the indexing again.
> When firing up the IDE it takes the better part of five minutes before you can even lift a finger.
If you see this every time after the IDEA finished indexing and reopening the IDEA, the caches might be corrupted for some reason.
Could you please get the IDEA logs from IDEA main menu's `Help | Collect Logs and Diagnostic Data`, upload them here https://uploads.jetbrains.com/, and share us the upload id for investigating?
> I understand that indexing is central to a lot of functions in IntelliJ, but can't you work towards making it less intrusive? Why go through the whole shebang every single time the IDE starts? The whole project, every single time? Why not use the indexes you have and run something less heavy and intrusive in the background? At least let a man work!
We are working towards making it less intrusive. (e.g. 1. making the cache recoverable and not easily broken after force shutdown and killed/crash to avoid the reindexing 2. defer indexing some dependencies source code).
See some related issues here:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-52/Recoverable-VFS-storage
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-314169