Everything Alpha Randomly Using High CPU. Process Won't Terminate After Exiting

[SolarTheory]

I have been experiencing a strange issue in which Everything 1.5a suddenly will begin consuming 50%+ of CPU, even when there is no active query or indexing occurring (at least, nothing that I can see via the GUI).

Looking at into Everything64.exe in Process Hacker, I see lots of disk I/O activity, with it doing a brunch of crawling of files/folders (I have no idea if this amount of background crawling is normal or not, but the CPU usage that comes with it is certainly unusual).

Even after seemingly exiting out of Everything via the tray icon, the process is still running in the background. I normally have to hard terminate it in Process Hacker or Task Manager. So, I finally decided to time how long it takes for the background process to completely exit.... and as of this writing, it has been running in the background for almost 1 hour after I exited out of it. All the while, it has been consuming between 40% to 80% of CPU, with active disk I/O and crawling activity.

It doesn't happen all the time. But it does happen frequently.

What do you think could be the issue?

[void]

Thank you for the issue report SolarTheory,

Could you please send a mini crash dump when Everything is busy:

• Download Process Explorer from Microsoft:
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer
• Wait for Everything to appear busy.
• In Process Explorer, select Everything.exe (If there is two, select the one using the most memory)
• Right click Everything.exe and under Create Dump, select Create Mini Dump.
• Choose a filename and click Save.
• Please send this file to support@voidtools.com

[void]

Please check the Index Journal for changes to your file systems.



There might be a bad icon shell extension.
Please try disabling icon shell extensions:

• Copy and paste the following into your Everything search box:
  /icon_shell_extensions=0
• Press ENTER in your Everything search box.
• If successful, icon_shell_extensions=0 is shown in the status bar for a few seconds.

[SolarTheory]

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner on this. Anyway, shortly after posting my original message, I did some testing and quickly realized that Everything was not properly exiting/terminating 100% of the time. I would always have to terminate the process forcefully via Process Hacker. So I decided to see what would happen if I started with a default Eveything-1.5a.ini file. And sure enough, the exiting problem went away. So through trial and error, comparing with my normal Everything-1.5a.ini configuration, I isolated the issue to this single line:

total_size_on_disk_column_visible=1

Setting this to "0" (i.e. removing the Size on Disk column) allowed Everything to exit cleanly. I don't know if it's related to the abnormally high CPU usage, but other than the occasional CPU usage spike when it's doing something like indexing etc, I have not yet felt a heavy toll on my machine due to Everything hogging the CPU for a long time. I will continue to monitor the situation.

In the meantime, I will use the "Allocation Size" column, instead of the "Size On Disk" column, as that generally gets me the same info.

Thanks

[void]

Thank you for your reply SolarTheory,

The Total Size and Total Size on Disk properties are insanely expensive.
These properties will lookup the size of all files in all subfolders.

There's a few niche searches where it is useful, usually for folders with not many subfolders.



I will mark these properties as content in the next alpha update.
I will also make these properties a little more hidden.



If you can, always use the Size column for instant searching, displaying and sorting of file/folder size.

[SolarTheory]

Yes, I noticed that they are pretty expensive. And in most cases, I will do my size sorting using the regular size column. But they are a game changer for me because I have a ton of documents in my Dropbox folder, many of which are set as "online-only" - that is they take up zero space on my hard disk. Their regular local size shows up in the size column, but their size on disk is zero. There are times when I need to isolate these files, such as when performing content searches in my Dropbox folder. Isolating these online-only files easily can help filter them out for content searching without triggering Dropbox to fetch them from the cloud.

Please, whatever you do, do not disable or remove these properties!

Thanks for such a great piece of software.