Intellij IDEA is popular IDE for programming language.

When you open existing maven or gradle or npm project in IntelliJ IDEA, It starts updating index at startup for couple of minutes and IDEA will not respond and unstable. Usually, If it is a new project, index takes longer time, nexttime onwards opening the project only updates index for the files that was added/deleted.

IntelliJ IDEA index issue forever

Sometimes, Indexing takes longer time and user unable to do any operation in IDEA.

The below steps are required to improve index update.

  • Invalidate cache

    Go to File menu and choose Invalidate Cache or Restart option

IF the above steps does not solve the issue, follow next steps

  • delete .idea and iml files in project folder

  • Increase memory in IDEA

  • disable third party plugins

  • You can also exclude the folder in current project

Goto File -> Project Settings -> Modules -> Sources