Issue 339: Whole system freezes repeatedly for a couple of seconds during real-time-indexing

I experienced this odd behaviour starting somewhere in Q4 last year. Took me some time to realize it was related to recoll. Basically, the whole desktop freezes for 1-2 seconds as recoll is indexing files. This happens again and again, thus beeing a major interruption for any activity. Wouldn’t be much of a problem if recoll would only index new or changed files. Unfortunately I can see it re-indexes stuff that was already in the index.

I can reproduce this simply by running $ recollindex -D -m

I already tried to re-create the index with $ recollindex -D -z -m but no success.

$ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS Release: 16.04 Codename: xenial

$ uname -a Linux IdeaCentre-K430 4.4.0-59-generic #80-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 6 17:47:47 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

What Recoll and Xapian versions are you using ?

One thing to try would be to actually remove the Xapian index, not just reset it : rm -rf ~/.recoll/xapiandb

If the reindexing persists, we need to look at the log file to see what is happening. Have a look at this for how to set things up: https://bitbucket.org/medoc/recoll/wiki/WhyIsMyFileNotIndexed

About the freezing, mostly the only thing which can really cause this is excessive memory usage by the indexer, causing paging/swapping. You need to use top or ps aux to check how much memory recollindex and its subprocess are using (look at the RSS column, we don’t really care about VSZ).

Also, you should be confident that something special is occurring on your system: this is really not normal Recoll behaviour, so we can probably find the cause and solve the issue.

Thanks for your promot response!

Meanwhile I deleted my index and recreated it. Currently testing if I can still reproduce this behaviour, will let you know as soon as I have some valid result.

On your other questions: Version: Recoll 1.21.5 + Xapian 1.2.22 Mem usage: I watched top quite often when this happend but neither memory nor cpu were anywhere close to its limits.

After having worked with my machine for a couple of days, I can say that this issue did not reappear. Thanks for your help!

Issue appears to be resolved, cause of the issue not found.