Folder Exclusion happens AFTER indexing all of the data which takes a long time

[neltherion]

Hi

I have more than 50 million files in one of the folders in my external HDD.

I exclude the 50 million files folder in the Everything settings. Then I connect the HDD to the system and enable the verbose debugging mode of Everything.

It seems that Everything first indexes ALL of the 50 million items and after consuming more than 8GBs of RAM, it starts to exclude the files which takes a LOT of time. After finally excluding the folder, the RAM usage drops to ~100MBs.

The problem is that I don't even want Everything to index the folder, so why doesn't it exclude it in the beginning to spare the RAM & CPU usage? also not mentioning the huge amount of time required for the index to be finished...

Is this supposed to be the right behavior?

[void]

Unfortunately, this is a limitation with Everything.

Everything needs to scan all files/folders first before it can exclude any files/folders by path.
Everything doesn't know the full path of files/folders as they are indexed, this information is built after the index completes.

You can use filename filters (with out the path part) to exclude files before they are indexed.
However, this will unlikely help your case.


Some suggestions:

Instead of using NTFS indexing, consider using folder indexing.
While folder indexing is typically slower than NTFS indexing, it might be faster and more efficient for your case:

• In Everything, from the Tools menu, click Options.
• Click the NTFS tab on the left.
• Select your external HDD.
• Uncheck Include in database.
• Click the Folders tab on the left.
• Click Add....
• Select a single folder on your external HDD you would like to include in your index.
• Repeat for additional folders.
• Click OK.

Consider splitting your external HDD into two or more partitions.

[neltherion]

Thanks so much void. Everything has been an everyday tool of my life for the last decade and it's thoughtful and robust design is one of its major selling points.

Thanks to your fast and detailed response, I was able to disable scanning the HDDs and add the needed folders for scanning manually.

Thanks again.