Question

What do I do if indexing in my JetBrains IDE is slow? It takes a lot of time for initial project indexing to finish, or every consequent re-indexing is slower than expected.

Things to keep in mind

Indexing speed depends on whether or not:

• files are located on network drives
• project files and/or caches folder are scanned for viruses
• there are deep/recursive symbolic links in project path
• there are tools that are watching and constantly updating project directories/caches => such updating will cause constant index re-building

In general, the less files you have in your project, the faster indexing is.

Also, if there are auto-generated files in your project, IDE can re-index them every time.

Solutions

There are several ways to make indexing faster in general:

• Use shared indexes
• Exclude files and folders
• Unload modules

You can also try to:

• Temporarily disable all of the non-bundled plugins and restart the IDE: File | Settings | Plugins | ⚙ | Disable all downloaded plugins
• File | Invalidate Caches -> check first three boxes -> Invalidate & Restart

⚠️ What to send to support if nothing helped

If the problem persists, please provide additional data for analysis:

1. Go to Help | Diagnostic Tools | Debug Log Settings and add the following entry there: #com.intellij.util.indexing.FileBasedIndexImpl:trace
2. Restart the IDE, reproduce the issue and collect the logs (entire archive): Help | Collect Logs and Diagnostics Data. We will look for exceptions and check your system environment settings
3. Capture 3-5 thread dumps manually via jstack while the problem is reproduced to better understand what code is being executed under the hood

All files can be attached to the support request or uploaded privately to our server. Make sure you provide the id of the upload so that we can find it.