Intelli J IDEA takes forever to update indices

Question

Is it normal for Intelli J to take a lot of time (almost 12 hours) to update indices for a project? I just installed Intelli J on my machine and imported a rather large Maven project (13k+ files).

I understand that the project is large but I let my computer up all night and when I woke up in the morning, Intelli J still hasn't finished updating the indices for the files yet, which makes it impossible to do anything since the popup with title 'Updating Index' keep hanging there in the middle of the screen.

How much [memory have you allocated to IntelliJ](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8542299/how-to-set-memory-for-the-vm-in-intellij-do-i-have-to-set-tomcat-memory-options/8542344#8542344)? I don't have any projects with that many source files, but I find it a bit unlikely it should take that long. — Dave Newton, Apr 13 '13 at 18:52
@abcXYZ Nowhere near enough; I wouldn't even try with anything under 1G. Check to see if you're thrashing VM. — Dave Newton, Apr 13 '13 at 18:57
You should contact JetBrains support. They are relatively good about supporting problems like this, even for CE users. — noahlz, Apr 15 '13 at 00:59
Sometimes, you may launch intellij from command line. It could be asking for git credentials. — GabLeRoux, Aug 11 '16 at 17:21

score 177 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 11 '14 at 06:41

177

There are several answers in the Forums for different IntelliJ Versions, here is what I´ve tried (IntelliJ 13).

Give more Memory. Does not help anything with the 'Updating indices'
Delete .idea and iml in project. Does not help.

In the end what resolved my problem with 'Updating indices' was:

delete 'caches' folder in user/.IntellIJIdea13/system/

answered Apr 11 '14 at 06:41

anho-dev

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Thanks! I think `File / Invalidate Caches` does the same. Helped me. – Pavel Vlasov Feb 18 '15 at 11:33
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My intellij idea actually started to update the indices after I invalidated caches, so I ended up waiting for more than an hour for real, but then it was ok. – Sepehr GH Jul 04 '20 at 06:33
1

.. or just `user/.IntelliJIdeaxxx/system/Maven/Indices`. – WesternGun Nov 02 '20 at 21:11
1

Started indexing the moment I did this as well, feeling this will take hours. They should REALLY fix this bug, at last. Love IntelliJ otherwise. – html_programmer Nov 30 '21 at 22:11
I did this and it worked temporarily, but then I had to keep deleting the caches each time and it stopped helping as much. Any ideas? – Sam A. Oct 06 '22 at 15:05
Let's try. Please take the following steps: Keep all 3rd custom plugins disabled. Close the project and remove the .idea folder from it (it makes sense to back it up first). Run through File | Invalidate Caches | Invalidate and Restart with Clear file system cache enabled. Wait for indexing to get stuck, wait for a minute or two longer. Share the logs (Help | Collect Logs and Diagnostic Data) here. – Ilya Dec 15 '22 at 08:16

score 129 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 04 '15 at 12:08

129

I tried deleting the cache and it works perfectly. Thanks for the solution friends.

Just:

Open IntelliJ IDEA
Select the File menu
Select the Invalidate Caches / Restart... menu.
Once selected you get a pop-up with a bunch of options.
Select Invalidate and Restart
and before doing that make sure you saved all your changes else it might delete some unsaved changes.

Once you hit that, IntelliJ will restart and then you can see that all the indexing is done really fast.

edited Nov 04 '15 at 12:08

Daniel A.A. Pelsmaeker

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answered Aug 24 '15 at 20:13

user2238153

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These recommendations do not make any difference to me. I have a monstruous thing made of 75 modules and thousands of source files and other random mess. Anyway, I will try at home too. Thanks. – Richard Gomes Feb 24 '16 at 17:17
let intellij update for 3 hours, forced stopped, after invalidating cache took only minutes – mahfuj asif Jun 13 '21 at 08:20
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5. Stop the IntelliJ task in Task Manager. Answer from 2015, but still having this issue. Thanks! – Victor Zakharov Aug 31 '21 at 11:31
Worked for me too. Thank you. I selected all the options in step 3 – Chowta Jun 14 '23 at 13:52

Shubham Chaudhary · Answer 3 · 2016-02-25T06:08:01.930

22

Delete caches in library folder

rm -rv ~/Library/Caches/IdeaIC15/caches/

On Mac OSX the location of cache is ~/Library/Caches

edited Feb 25 '16 at 06:08

answered Sep 02 '15 at 09:31

Shubham Chaudhary

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My situation is that I have installed both ultimate and community version. And I opened projects using ultimate version first. Only deleting caches didn't work for me. I need to delete caches and restart my system which makes the indexing issue fixed. – Michelle Mar 09 '16 at 06:08
1

works flawlessly @ShubhamChaudhary – Gaurav Feb 13 '22 at 20:29

score 19 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 23 '20 at 07:27

19

In Intellij 2020.2 I faced this problem too. Restart/Invalidating cache didn't work for me. What I did was just deleting the cache folder in the following path:

C:\Users\davoud\AppData\Local\JetBrains\IntelliJIdea2020.2

answered Sep 23 '20 at 07:27

Davoud

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My cache directory was 2GB, probably a lot of information in there, accrued over a long time. Some from projects that I am no longer working on. Deleting the directory and letting it reindex my current project yielded an 80MB cache, and was done in 30 seconds. – Kshitiz Sharma Sep 14 '21 at 13:32

score 8 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 03 '21 at 05:36

8

I was able to solve this by going to File -> Invalidate Caches / Restart

Then on the dialog that opens select "Invalidate and Restart"

answered Dec 03 '21 at 05:36

naib khan

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score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 11 '17 at 10:29

I had the same problem with IntelliJ 2017.2.3 - i.e. my project would keep updating indexes over and over again.

I discovered that I had gone over my disk quota in my home directory. By default IntelliJ stores the indexes in the home directory like this:

~/.IdeaIC2017.2/system/index/

The solution for me was to:

Quit IntelliJ
Move the whole .IdeaIC2017.2 directory to another mount which has more space:
```
mkdir /space/ideaConfig
mv ~/.IdeaIC2017.2 /space/ideaConfig/IdeaIC
```

Update bin/idea.properties to point at the new index/config location:

idea.config.path=/space/ideaConfig/IdeaIC/config
idea.system.path=/space/ideaConfig/IdeaIC/system

It is possible that some of the other answers to this question were due to the same problem and were inadvertently fixed by "deleting caches folder", "invalidating caches" etc which would have potentially freed up enough disk space to build the indexes.

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Oct 03 '18 at 11:59

Though the accepted and other answers may fix a particular problem, I have found that the problem with very long indexing times often comes from the fact that a repository contains or links to some directory that contains a large number of files. Often this is done for testing and the directory in question is not actually part of the project, e.g. ignored by the VCS.

The IDE does not automatically ignore those directories when indexing, but it is possible to "exclude" the directory from the project. This will prevent indexing as well.

score 2 · Answer 8 · edited Apr 18 '20 at 16:09

2

the easier way is as follow: file --> settings --> (uncheck) Synchronize files on frame or editor tab activation.

enter image description here

edited Apr 18 '20 at 16:09

Machavity

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answered Apr 18 '20 at 16:08

Zakaria Abdelhadi

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score 2 · Answer 9 · answered Jun 06 '23 at 09:19

2

Follow below steps to resolve Intelli J IDEA takes forever to update indices

1.Open IntelliJ IDEA
2.Select the File menu
3.Select the Invalidate Caches
4.Once selected you get a pop-up with options.
5.Click on Invalidate and Restart

answered Jun 06 '23 at 09:19

Vasista TVN

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This worked for me, thank you! ps: In the pop-up that opens, there are ~5 checkboxes. I selected none of them and just clicked "Invalidate and Restart". – Svetoslav Stefanov Jun 19 '23 at 11:49

18446744073709551615 · Answer 10 · 2019-02-06T11:00:32.993

I guess Idea is more collecting garbage than doing useful work. Use G1 GC instead of the default.

Help -- Edit Custom VM Options

-XX:+UseG1GC

instead of

-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC

and of course restart Idea.

Downside: G1 tries to collect garbage before stopping the process. This is insane, but this is what it does. For a program with 16G of heap, cleaning-up took 27 minutes. So do not configure your Idea to use a 16G heap.

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered Aug 05 '22 at 05:45

1

"Invalidate Caches.." always works for me.

answered Aug 05 '22 at 05:45

Pobaranchuk

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Willie · Answer 12 · 2020-11-09T08:12:33.110

0

you can manually exclude file or directory withIDEA Indexing, it can improve file load speed. some files are generated dynamic， we don't need index these files every time when we start IDEA.

edited Nov 09 '20 at 08:12

answered Nov 09 '20 at 08:04

Willie

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score 0 · Answer 13 · answered Dec 21 '22 at 18:12

So, for all of you that are still in pain because of this when using Windows (with or without WSL) you can try this: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-293604/IntelliJ-is-hanging-during-build-process-and-indexing-process-when-working-on-the-WSL-projects.#focus=Comments-27-6427409.0-0

Windows defender can be very demanding with these things. Excluding idea64.exe process just made everything fast again for me.

score -1 · Answer 14 · answered Oct 10 '18 at 01:16

-1

probably - old bug in caching system. it happens in ALL versions, especially if you upgrade your version of IntelliJ or JDK. To fix it: 1) close the GUI. 2) go to %HOME_DIR%.IntelliJIdeaXXXX\system\caches and delete it 3) start the the GUI again.

answered Oct 10 '18 at 01:16

Iakov Senatov

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score -1 · Answer 15 · answered May 20 '21 at 13:56

-1

IDEA 2020.2 Right click folder under the Project, then mark as Exclude to exclude folder that you don't want to index

answered May 20 '21 at 13:56

sung sung

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score -2 · Answer 16 · answered Apr 28 '21 at 05:04

-2

~/Library/Caches/JetBrains/IntelliJIdea2021.1 it's works for me..

answered Apr 28 '21 at 05:04

user4336371

7

Intelli J IDEA takes forever to update indices

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