It seems that Devonthink Pro Office is constantly indexing and reindexing in the background, without me telling it to.
Is there a setting somewhere to have it stop?
From v2.6, DEVONthink will update indexed items whenever the parent group is clicked. Does that count as “constantly”?
The auto-index-updating can be turned off with this command in Terminal:
defaults write com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2 DisableAutomaticUpdatingOfIndexedItems -bool TRUE
Thanks. I have over 30,000 documents. It’s a big pain in the ass.
I just wanted to come back again and say how much more awesome DPTO is now that I turned it off.
It’s a HUGE MISTAKE to make automatic reindexing mandatory. Please make it a toggle. I have in i7 iMac with 12 GB of RAM, and over 30,000 documents.
DTPO was constantly beachballing because it was constantly re-indexing. This is not a feature. It’s a bug. I almost gave up on it entirely.
To help Dtech troubleshoot this, I expect it might be helpful for them if you were to open a support ticket, including all the info on your configuration (number of groups in the database, primary type of documents, what type of drive the indexed documents reside on, etc.). The auto-update of external (indexed) groups only occurs when the user selects/opens an indexed group, and the auto-indexing is limited to that folder and its contents. The complete hierarchy of the group is not auto-indexed. In other words, you shouldn’t be seeing this. I don’t see this with my databases, which are 100% indexed.
Just curious, but how deep is the hierarchy for your indexed groups? Are all 30k documents in folders and sub-folders of one indexed group, or something else?
The way you’re using DEVONthink sounds non-standard so I’d hesitate to qualify it as a bug.
Auto-updating is a very often requested feature and should only update visible groups. So if you had an indexed group with 1000 subfolders but that group was closed, it shouldn’t recursively update the subGroups.
Making it preferential would lead to more problems since there are Groups people would want autoUpdated and others they wouldn’t, which either leads to turning the preference on and off (ugly) or having no autoUpdate available at all (which was the complaint).
You can open a ticket with Support if you’d like to see if there’s (1) a way to work with your process, or (2) to find a better way to do what you’re trying to do.
Edited for (hopeful clarity).
I’ve never heard that some ways of indexing can be non-standard – and it might be helpful for future readers if DEVONtech could explain what the recommended practice is. I do quite a bit of indexing – several tens of thousands of records in databases that have been in place for years – and have never seen any problems. I’ve understood from my own experience, and from lot of threads posted here over the years, that from a performance perspective indexing vs importing is pretty much a wash. If indexing is a problem, then I would want to know at what use level I should stop doing it.
I edited my original statement to (hopefully) be more clear. The question isn’t a matter of the number of indexed documents.
The question I have is how the group is structured. We have people who will try to drop their entire hard drives into DEVONthink (hoping it’s a Spotlight replacement). While this may be possible, it is highly inadvisable. You could easily run into a similar situation if someone tried to index an entire offline drive, especially considering the need to update the structure.
I suggest that a better solution would be to index smaller, discrete locations into more focused groups as needed.
Where are the indexed items located, e.g. on a server volume or on an internal drive? In addition, how many items do the indexed folders contain? Are the indexed folders regularly modified by other applications?