IntelliJ indexing Too Slow

Question

When I open my project (which is already imported long time ago), iIntelliJ starts Indexing the files. Sometimes the indexing takes more than 5 minutes. During that time I can't navigate the code in Intellij as the element information is not available during indexing. This is slowing me down when I try to quickly open a project and read a few lines of code across a few files.

I noticed that IntelliJ is indexing JDK files under /Library/java/JavaVirtualMachine/jdk1.8.0231/.

As far as I understand, Indexing is needed only for navigating the files from IntelliJ. If that is the case, can I disable indexing for Jdk files to speedup indexing?

Has anyone had slow indexing issues before and were able to solve it?

Setup Details

• OS : macOS Mojave version : 10.14.6 (18G9028)
• IntelliJ Version : IntelliJ Idea 2019.3.5 community edition

Thanks

Pavan

Answer 1

Index is needed for most of the IDE smart features, not only for the navigation. You can't exclude just JDK from indexing, you won't have code completion for the JDK classes/methods, etc.

Note that JDK is indexed only once and project classes/libraries are reindexed only when they change.

Recent IntelliJ IDEA has shared indexes feature that can help to reduce the initial index times.