Why is IntelliJ IDEA hanging on “Indexing”?

Answer 1

I had the same problem with IntelliJ 2017.3.2. When I clicked on the indexing progress bar I noticed it was hung on a directory within my build directory. When I did a gradlew clean which removed that directory then the indexing was able to proceed.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem with 2019.1.4. However, mine would change directories and sometimes, eventually, finish. If it did finish, it was somewhere in the 8-10 minute range.

I was all over SO, and even JetBrains' forums. I excluded directories via Project Structure | Modules. I used Invalidate Caches And Restart on multiple occasions. I tried having only 1 project open to let it finish. I installed and tried 2019.2.4 and 2019.3.3 (the latter would crash for other reasons). And best of all, it only seemed to happen on one project!

What ultimately led me to an answer was Help > Activity Monitor... where I found psi.impl.cache.impl.todo was running at nearly 100% CPU and not showing signs of stopping.

It turned out, I had a TODO filter setup with a poorly-defined RegEx. It was something like \b.*wip\b.*; the idea was to find all of our "WIP" values. Well, the leading .* was a huge mistake and one that didn't occur to me until losing many hours blaming a plugin upgrade. I believe the reason this was a bad filter was because the project it was hanging on is in ExtJS, which is JavaScript, which means things are in triplicate with the app.js file and whatnot...

Answer 3

I was stuck with a similar issue with the latest IntelliJ Idea 2019.3, so maybe it'll help. For me the issue was with one of the plugins, uninstalling/reinstalling, cleaning caches didn't help. My steps were:

1. Kill intellij, start it over
2. When it's starting and about to load a project, be quick and cancel opening the project. This way you'll end up with a small window with a list of previously opened projects and a few menu items.
3. Open menu > plugins, disable them all
4. Restart intellij idea, open any project.

If step 4 above succeeds (which happened to me), one by one try enabling the plugins to see which one is causing error. For me it was Kubernetes plugin from JetBrains.

Answer 4

I was able to resolve this problem by removing all of my "target" folders from my project.

Answer 5

seems that there might be several reasons for getting into this "indexing" hell. I spent few hours trying to fix it using the ideas above. At the end of the day, with some profiling work, I found that the bad guy in my case was the csv plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10037-csv-plugin

I had few (not so large) CSV files serving as input, and although I marked them as not to be indexed, the plugin kept trying to index them. Once I removed the plugin everything worked fine.

Answer 6

In my case I found out that Intellij is actually trying to index a 50GB directory with logs that was under the project's root. Make sure that if you have such a directory, it is marked as "Excluded" in the IDE.

You can see which file the IDE is indexing currently in the Indexing Status window (access by clicking on the indexing message in the toolbar). You may need to enlarge this window to see the full path of the file currently being indexed.