Does Pausing Indexing Really Do Anything?

Doc B

My computer's performance is significantly degraded when L5 indexes.  That's nothing new.  So I can right-click the icon in the system tray and pause it for four hours, and everything is fine, right?

Not really.  Performance is still affected with the indexer paused.  So I opened my Process Manager to see what was going on.  Here's what I see-

Why is the indexer using so much memory when it is paused?  (I waited about five minutes after pausing to check this number, just to allow everything to settle down.)

For comparison, I restarted the indexer and let it stabilize.  It peaked at about 250,000K and stabilized around 235-

So it is using just under half the memory paused as it uses in operation.  That seems strange to me, but I'm no programmer.

NB.Mick

Doc,

the issue is probably not the 100k allocated by the indexer when it's not running, but the constant reading of resources from the hard disk, computing the index and writing back the index file to the hard disk.

My PC has near the mimimum spec of requirements page. It nearly stalls when indexing is going on for a larger resource package, such as the Classical Commentaries or so (no issue with a small PB or vyrso book). Only virus scan is worse. Pausing the indexer really helps me back to usual performance.

Mick 

Todd Phillips

Doc B said:

Why is the indexer using so much memory when it is paused?  (I waited about five minutes after pausing to check this number, just to allow everything to settle down.)

The purpose of pausing is to free up the CPU.  It does do that, but it has
to complete whatever step it is currently on, so you may experience al
delay after it is paused before it is really paused.

The indexer will still use memory when it is paused because it has to maintain its state in memory while it waits to start up again.  It doesn't write that state out to disk, because that would take so long that "pausing" would become meaningless.

 

 

Doc B

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/427830#Comment_427830

Todd Phillips said:

The indexer will still use memory when it is paused because it has to maintain its state in memory while it waits to start up again.

Thanks, Todd.  I understand this, but most of the latent programs on my machine maintain themselves in memory by using about 200K to maybe 1200K.  L5 Indexer uses over a hundred thousand K.  That's really my question.

More info- here's the trace of my CPU usage with indexer running...it seems to have periods of peak at 250,000K or so, then drop back to the 40,000K range for periods of time.  It is more stable when paused, but still fluctuates a tad. ('Tad' is a technical term.)

 

 

FWIW, I am finding L5 itself to be a tad faster than L4 was, running the same operation.  But indexing seems a tad slower.  I bet those two things are not unrelated, and I'll put up with slower indexing for faster performance.  But please don't release daily updates!

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/427854#Comment_427854

Doc B said:

Thanks, Todd.  I understand this, but most of the latent programs on my machine maintain themselves in memory by using about 200K to maybe 1200K.  L5 Indexer uses over a hundred thousand K.  That's really my question.

This is a question for Logos to answer!