J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

I used to open "Everything" and then leave it running. It takes a few
seconds to open, then settles down; I can use it, and it finds things
amazingly fast. It is an excellent utility!

However, of late: some minutes after I've opened it and all has settled
down, I hear my fan spin up (it is normally idling), and I start Task
Manager to see what's using CPU - and I see Everything.exe is using 25%
CPU (four apparent cores - I think it's an i3). This applies though I
haven't typed anything new into the search box. Closing the search
window doesn't stop it; however, selecting Exit from the menu that
appears when I right-click on the tray icon does stop it, within a small
number of seconds.

It's consistent - meaning Exit-ing it _always_ stops the 25% and fan, so
I am definite that Everything is the cause; I can't say that running it
always starts the 25% [I just started it again while typing this post,
and it hasn't gone berserk yet - Task Manager shows it sitting there at
00 CPU. It also came up immediately, with the search box showing all
files, i. e. without the few seconds' wait I usually experience when I
start it, so it presumably has some cache somewhere or something.]

I just have a simple system - two partitions on one HD; in particular, I
_don't_ have any network drives.

You might ask what I'm _doing_ when it goes berserk: I can't say it is
always this, but usually downloading a video file or two: I tend to have
Everything open as I use it to see if I've already got a particular file
before starting the download. But once E. has started its berserking,
even if I don't download any more, it doesn't stop 25%ing after the
current download has completed.

If voidtools _are_ doing some mining, I probably wouldn't mind, but I've
just looked at the website - there's no mention of such. Nor anything in
the FAQ about "why is Everything using so much CPU" or similar question.

If not (and I really don't think it is), I'm very puzzled about what it
_is_ doing! I did ask this here before, and I think there were
suggestions about doing a re-index; but I can't see why it should do
that continuously, especially when I'm not doing anything.

[FWIW, for the several minutes since I restarted it a few paragraphs
ago, it _hasn't_ gone above 00 in Task Manager. Maybe that's what I'll
have to do in futu start it, stop it when it goes berserk, then start
it again. But it seems decidedly odd!]

Its immediate search results require previous searching. Like Windows
own indexing, Search Everything has to build its own index. I suspect
it occasionally performs an update by scanning the drives to detect
anything that changed that its service might've not captured at the time
of change.

Unless I missed it, I did not see an option of when to reindex in the
background.

They have their own forums. Alas, unless you login you cannot search
their forums on inquiries about background indexing.

If you are concerned about data mining, use a network monitor, like
wireshark, to check if the program is phoning home. Make sure to
disable its auto-update check to eliminate that network traffic. If you
don't want all the history of traffic that wireshark affords along with
the complexity of that tool, you could use SysInternals' TCPview to
check what connections are defined at the time you notice the large
increase in CPU usage to see if there is any network traffic from the
everything.exe process(es).

Presumably you are using Search Everything in its default or
install-time setup. If you altered its configuration, like to enable
its HTTPS server to share its search database, then perhaps one of your
other hosts is querying that HTTP server. While you mentioned a higher
CPU usage, you also mentioned concerned about data mining and that would
require network traffic.