Why is IntelliJ IDEA hanging on “Indexing”?

Answer 1

Select Help -> Debug Log Settings...

Add the following line (note the leading # symbol)

#com.intellij.util.indexing:trace

Relaunch the IDE (don't need to invalidate cache as that will cause it to start from scratch, whereas restarting from the point of failure, for me anyway, reported the problem file as soon as I restarted):

Scheduling indexing of file://C:/dev/tools/ruby/lib/ruby/2.2.0/x64-mingw32/win32ole.so by request of index Stubs

Our project doesn't use win32ole so I moved the file to a safe location and restarted my IDE... Bingo, problem gone, indexing finally completed after almost 1 year of effectively using intellij as a slightly-smarter-than-notepad ruby editor.

Answer 2

I have encountered this problem, and resolved it:

1. remove idea
2. delete all files and dirs which name regex 'jetbrain' and 'IntelliJ' in my computer(Mac mini)
3. then install idea

I also try just delete idea cache files, it do not work.

Answer 3

I had this issue as well with version 2016.2 on Mac OS X. I had to do a force quit to end the application, then I deleted the .idea folder. The next time I launched IntelliJ everything worked fine, it had no problem indexing the project.

Answer 4

I've finally figured it out. The solution was... Rather odd. TL;DR: Run it under strace. Read on for a more detailed explanation.

I came upon it when I decided to run IntelliJ under strace to see what files it was opening to determine whether or not it was a filesystem bottleneck.

This gave me some very strange results: strace was spewing out a near-constant stream of segfaults. Not only that, but IntelliJ was running just fine, not taking forever to index.

After consulting with a friend, I learned that on Arch Linux, systemd logs a dump of a process's memory every time a segfault occurs, except when a debugger is attached. strace is considered a debugger. Arch was thrashing my disks when it kept logging memory dumps due to all the segfaults, hence why the indexing was taking so long, because it was fighting for disk I/O.

My solution for now is to simply run IntelliJ under strace. I will, however, be looking into the issue further, as I don't think java should be segfaulting that much.

Answer 5

edit Intellij[VERSION]/bin/idea.properties, set idea.max.intellisense.filesize=50

update: Intellij will skip index files that size larger than 50kb.try this if you have many libraries or many large files(too many characters one line or too many lines)

Answer 6

Had the same issue in the past on some Scala project. I have installed IDEA 16 EAP (https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IDEADEV/IDEA+16+EAP) and the problem has gone.