Why it's updating indices again and again? making it unusable at all

This feature must be improved!!! it makes the best IDE to the worst software in the world...

please fire the guy who made it...he is destroying the product

I agree with Leon my pyharm just finished updating indices for 2 hours then I close and launched again and it is started indices again for hours. 

I am not professional developer or programmer I am an mechanical engineer but I do not understand the logic and need for "indices" operation. 

If it is necessary why Anaconda Navigator's Spyder does not do it. And I see a lot of complaints about it why JetBrains is not fixing it.I paid again for second year but can hardly run "Hello World" program. Can someone again explain what does tgis operation do and why other IDEs do not have it 

Not funny... "Updating Indices - Indexing...", only a few files... waiting and waiting again...

PLEASE IMPROVE THIS!

Can a log tell me, what IDEA is doing the whole time? In htop, I see a lot of PIDs with ~/.local/share/JetBrains/Toolbox/apps/IDEA-U/ch-0/192.16603.28/..., but the progress bar isn't moving and my PC doesn't seem to write to disc. I don't know, if there is any real progress at all...

If only the IDE would do what people are saying here "it only index once" nope, it indexes if it crashes too (which unfortunately happens quite often once you write something more than hello world)

I wish we could just disable this

Hello Yaroslav,

it's easy to reproduce: create an app with some files (in my case Java EE), open it as a project in IDEA. Close IDEA.
Then change some code outside of IDEA and outside of the IDEA project directory, copy all the files with some File-Explorer (Nautilus, Windows-Explorer) and paste it in IDEA into the project. IDEA will start to index and never come back to work.

The reason I want to do this is, that we get source code as war-files and build our local archive and make diffs via git with them.

While that is an "overwrite all" with files, git will only add source code changes, regardless if the files timestamps changed. I will not search for changed files and replace them manually one by one: outside IDEA it's just copy&paste from a new temporary source-folder of the extracted war to the IDEA project folder, then a "git add -A" and "git commit [...]" in the terminal, all done in seconds for our archive to get synced to the external work. Pasting within IDEA into the project directory, my PC is getting useless, because IDEA will index without progress. I had to kill IDEA every time I tried...

cant believe this is happen to webstorm, im proud of picking it as my best IDE and showing off to my collegues, and this updating indicing thing jus kills my reputation...

Dayanshu W

Please also add #com.intellij.openapi.util.io.FileSystemUtil:trace in Help | Debug Log Settings and check what files are indexed in the idea.log (https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/articles/207241085). You can also submit a support ticket with the idea.log attached, so we could help to find a root cause. 

It depends on the plug-in. Some plug-ins do require indexing, other don't. We are currently working on the new Dynamic Plugins architecture that will make it less frequent.

Back to Eclipse

Update: seemed to be the Vaadin Designer update to 4.5.1 -> be carefull

This problem still exists in latest 2021.1.

I found it is very likely to happen when there are several IDEA instances. All instances will rebuild at the same time, especially rebuild index of JDK11.

If I close other instance and left only one, it will still repeatedly rebuild indexes. The only one solution is close all instances, and reopen them.

This problem is very annoying, hope it can be resolved soon.

A year later after last answer I still searching for a solution of this problem. Even latest ultimate Idea with "downloading shared indices" still stops my work almost every time I restart my computer.

Your product is great and amazing, but this problem is so annoying, I have to prevent my laptop from switching off and have to keep opened projects (it consumes most part of the RAM)

Serge Baranov I did submit a ticket with logs as requested. However is this bug where IntelliJ reindexes everything on start up being looked into? It's the entire Maven repo, its the JDK, etc... That seems excessive. Especially since newer versions of IntelliJ sells themselves on the Shared Indexes that are downloaded - they don't seem to be doing anything.

>> Could you please update to the latest version and check if the issue is still there? If it is please file a ticket and share log files with us

Hi.

IDEA 2021.2.2 - it looks like the situation has become better. At least I do not remember re-indexing after each project opening last weeks. IDEA after a project opening searches for files for indexing (it takes 1-2 minutes) and checks spring configuration.

Full (and long) re-indexing remains if IDEA was incorrectly closed (killed as process, power was switched off). But I guess this is another case and it happens not so often. 

Thank you for feedback and reaction

It also indexes out of nothing too. Which is quite annoying. I was working on a class, and after saving it it started indexing, what seems to be internal jars of intellij, and I got no code completion for like 3 minutes.

Hello Jochen,

Please report an issue on YouTrack attaching logs folder zipped (https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/articles/207241085-Locating-IDE-log-files) after facing the issue again: http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/IDEA.

Jochen,

I don't get long indexing process on my machine after pasting files. Probably some extra steps are needed to reproduce?

I'm seeing the indexing problem as well.

In my case, it started after my anti-virus software quarantined these files, which appear to be internal to Intellij:

:cd .IntelliJIdea2019.3/system/index/
:find . -name 'hashes*'
./.persistent/hashesWithFileType
./.persistent/hashesWithFileType.keystream
./.persistent/hashesWithFileType.keystream.len
./.persistent/hashesWithFileType.len
./.persistent/hashesWithFileType_i.len
:pwd
<My HOME directory>/.IntelliJIdea2019.3/system/index

Are these files used for indexing?

>Are these files used for indexing?

Yes. Please exclude IDE settings/cache directories, the IDE installation home and project files from the scan.

It happens with me also, in PHPSTORM.

Try to invalidate cache and restart.

Every time a plugin is updated in Intellij Ultimate 2020.1 (and previous ones) it indexes all the maven dependencies again and again.

Why on earth any plugin update will require the index also be updated from scratch??

Hi, 

I'm facing the same problem with PyCharm Community on Ubuntu 18.04:

* my project folder is /home/my_name/Downloads

* Pycharm try to index ALL the files and folders in my /home/my_name, EVERYTHING, even the .cache, .virtualenv... folders and not only in the project folder

 * so I delete everything in this folder (even the .idea folder), then I restart Pycharm

* and, again, Pycharm indexes ALL files and folders in my /home folder (see image)

Why?

Best regards,

Philippe

A question related to this comment here: 

What is the scope of this full index operation? My IntelliJ seems to be indexing my whole filesystem, as mentioned by Philippe Juhel. Should it be only the opened project? It is indeed really slow.

I'm on ubuntu 19.10 with IntelliJ Ultimate.

This skeleton generation strategy is the most pants-on-head stupid feature I never asked for. I simply don't know what you mean when you advise to exclude the problematic directory from the project roots. PyCharm indexes MY ENTIRE HARD DRIVE. There isn't even an OPTION to exclude ancestral directories from the project sources. The problem lies in the jdk.table.xml file, which includes the root directory of all my Python projects. But when I remove this line, it grows back immediately the next time I restart like kudzu. I HATE THIS SO MUCH.

@Kevin Zeidler

>I simply don't know what you mean when you advise to exclude the problematic directory from the project roots.

If the problematic directory is in your project, then you can right-click it and choose Mark Directory as -> Excluded.
If it's not in the project, then make sure it's not in the Interpreter Paths https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/installing-uninstalling-and-reloading-interpreter-paths.html

> If the problematic directory is in your project, then you can right-click it and choose Mark Directory as -> Excluded.
It's not - because, again, the skeleton indexes virtually my entire hard drive. Hundreds of thousands of files and directories indexed every time I start a new project. The cache inevitably grows to >50GB unless I manually delete it periodically.

>If it's not in the project, then make sure it's not in the Interpreter Paths https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/installing-uninstalling-and-reloading-interpreter-paths.html
Interpreter Paths consist solely of descendants of the project root. 

 

To reiterate, the problem lies in the jdk.table.xml file, which includes several problem directories. It is almost certainly related to this file, because when I grep PyCharm dirs for those specific strings, this is one of the only places it occurs (other than log files). I cannot delete those entries. They regenerate the next time I start PyCharm. I even attempted to revoke its write privileges to that file, but that interfered with startup and PyCharm printed an error about being unable to load settings.

Have the same issue for all maven projects

Oleksiyprosyanko

What is your OS / IDE version? Have you tried any of the solutions suggested in this thread?

OS: MacOS Catalina 10.15.6

IDE: Ultimate 2020.2.1

I have this issue for Javas project only or any other project containing Java code.  My Scala projects behaves normally. 

Did not help. I disabled all `Probable bugs` under `Java` inspection.