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Old July 18th 18, 03:17 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Posts: 10,881
Default What's "Everything" doing?

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

In message , VanguardLH
writes:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

I just found Everything using most of one of my cores, after leaving the
machine unattended - but on - for some hours. It showed in task manager
as using 2x% of CPU (Task Manager thinks I have four cores), and when I
shut it down (via the tray icon, not from Task Manager), CPUsage went
back to idle.

I've just reopened Everything (once I have opened it, I normally leave
it open, as it's so useful), and (after initial peak) it's sitting there
down at near enough zero CPU usage again.

I've noticed this behaviour more than once recently. Anyone know what
it's doing? FWIW, it's "Version 1.4.1.895 (x86)".

(Hour or two later: it's still down in the 00 usage.)


Are you running it as a service? It is a file indexer, just like is the
Windows Search service. That means having to monitor and record changes
made through the file system calls (create, rename, move, delete, etc).
When running as a service, you do not need to leave the Everything
window open. In fact, that's just a waste of GUI resources until you
decide to do a file search because Everything is still running in the
background as a service.

In Everything, go to Tools - Options - General: UI tree node. Is the
option enabled to "Run in background"?


Yes.

When you returned to your computer and Everything.exe got busy, was the
computer sleeping and you woke it up? Low-priority processes or those
configured to not wake the computer will pend their disk I/O until you
wake up the computer (or a BIOS alarm wakes it or a scheduled event in
Task Scheduler is configured to wake the computer).


No, I didn't wake it up - I don't sleep it; I noticed as I approached
that the fan was running, and when I looked at Task Manager (which I'd
left open), I could see that one core had been busy for more than
however long the Task Manager graphs run for - certainly since before I
touched it. So Everything didn't _get_ busy, it already _was_ busy. And
when I stopped it (from the tray icon), the busyness went away. (And
didn't come back when I restarted - well, it might have for the first
minute or less, but not after that - still isn't, many hours later.)


I've not used the options but there are command-line switches you can
use with everything.exe to produce debug output:

-debug
-debug-log

I think Paul mentioned monitoring file I/O to see what might be altering
the files when Everything gets busy. Updates (writes which result in
changes to file modification datestamps), deletes, and renaming folders,
especially those with lots of files, is expensive to any filename
indexer.

We don't know what processes are running on your computer. As an
example, anything using SQL or any database may occasionally do a purge
and compaction or writing or deleting tons of session data all of which
makes Everything thrash trying to keep up. You should review all
processes that are running to see just what programs are running on your
computer, and then determine if some of them will perform some disk I/O
to maintain themselves. For example, did you disable Windows Indexing
to eliminate that one from running? It will perform a low-priority
background index that Everything might pick up. An anti-virus that
decides to perform a scan, whether scheduled or some other trigger,
could end up updating lots of files. For example, awhile back, many AVs
would create a hash of a file they just scanned to save in the ADS
(alternate data stream) of a file (only doable in NTFS). Later when
another scan was performed, it would rehash the file and compare to the
hash saved the ADS of the file. If the hash matched, the AV would skip
that unchanged file rather than compare it against its signature
database. The skipped files wouldn't get changed but newly scanned
files (since the prior scan) would result in an updated ADS for each
file which Everything might see as a file write operation.

If you run multiple security programs (e.g., two anti-virus or an
anti-virus and an anti-malware) with their on-access (real-time)
scanners active, they can compete with each other. One sees a file got
touched (by another AV), so it scans the file. The other AV sees a file
change so it scans the file. And the vicious cycle repeats. I had that
happen once where within one minute the two AVs had performed over 4000
writes on the same file, and were doing so on multiple files. Tis one
of the reasons that secondary AVs should be passive only: their
on-access scanner is disabled and they are used only for manually
instigated scans.

I've yet to see high CPU usage by Everything except when I use it to do
a search, more so if I use its "content:" operator to dig inside of
files (which will be slow having to open all matching files to do a
substring search). Haven't heard many other Everything users noticing a
high CPU usage by that program. That's why I mentioned you should
probably analyze what processes you leave running on your computer to
see if whatever they do will cause Everything to perform more indexing.
Paul's suggestion to monitor file I/O would point at the culprit doing
tons of file changes (write, read, delete, rename, etc). Just be
careful when you enable the logging. As the log gets bigger, the OS
will slow down. After a couple hours, I was wondering why my computer
had slowed to a crawl, remembered that I had enabled logging in Process
Monitor, stopped the logging, and voila the computer was snappy again.
If you aren't using your computer but Everything is thrashing to perform
lots of indexing then something else is using your computer.

In Everything.ini (there will be a copy in the program installation and
under the %appdata%\Everything folders), you can change max_threads. I
think 0 (zero) means to open as many threads as there are processors
(which would be cores across all CPUs). Setting it less, like 1 less
than the number of cores, would make Everything use less CPU but make
its indexing take longer.
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