Find in project makes brackets freeze when searching huge projects

[PabloK]

When using the find in project feature in larger projects brackets crashes after eating trough all system resources. This is especially true for larger projects. My project is currently of about 200mb in size. With some text data files included.

I am currently on a machine with 3GB ram and Intel Core 2 DUO CPU.

It seems to me that brackets allocates memory for all of the files in the project before starting a search trough. As memory is scarce on this machine brackets wil try to use the hard drive as memory but this is slow and thus CPU load sky rockets.

Suggestion: An option to only search trough certain file types or alternativley another algorithm for full project search trough could fix this.

Thanks for a lovely product! 👍

[PabloK]

Im available for questions if you need more information.

[TomMalbran]

Release 37 should allow you to Exclude files/folders from an individual Find in Files operation.

You can also right click on any folder in the sidebar and do a Find in Files within the contents of that folder.

[PabloK]

Thats great! I still think there might be room for a more memory efficient find in project. Is there anything I could do to contribute?

[peterflynn]

@PabloK WHen you say "crashes" do you mean the Brackets window just disappears suddenly? Or Brackets is still open but becomes unresponsive? If it's unresponsive, can you try waiting a minute or so to see if it comes back?

200 MB sounds like a very large project, unless that's almost entirely binary files. It will definitely take some time to read and search the contents of 200 MB worth of files, and during that time Brackets will appear to be frozen. (In the future we'll provide a progress meter and remain responsive while the search is ongoing -- see this user story -- but we're not there yet).

[PabloK]

To be honest I dint see it crash how ever it freezes as you correctly described. The project contains a few images and also some text representations of 3d objects. It tried how ever waiting for quite long and brackets continues to eat resources. Perhaps excluding certain file types on default could help or processing in a different thread? Thanks again for a great product.

[ingorichter]

This seems to be a dupe of #6901.

[dangoor]

Reviewed medium priority to @peterflynn.

[marcelgerber]

@ingorichter I don't think so. #6901 is about Brackets getting slow (even after restart, reinstall, ...) after using Find in Files, but this is "just" a crash while using it.

[PabloK]

Not a dupe. I have nl problem after restarting brackets. Just duri g find in project and only for larger projects.

[peterflynn]

Nominating for 1.0 -- we can't guarantee fast performance when searching 200 MB of text, but we shouldn't just freeze for long periods. This may wind up being redundant with the async, cancelable search user story, but leaving open for now until we know what's going on.

[peterflynn]

Reviewed - keeping in 1.0

[peterflynn]

@PabloK I never asked this directly before, but here's an important question: is the 200 MB all text you actually want to search through?

• If it's 200 MB of text you want to search, the only things we can do are make it faster or give you a progress meter.
• If most of the 200 MB is binary data (not text files), then newer versions of Brackets should automatically skip those files. Please let me know if your situation falls into this bullet but you're still seeing performance problems.
• If the 200 MB is text files, but most of it isn't text you actually want to search through, then you can use the search exclusions feature to tell Brackets which file names/extensions or folders to ignore. Please let me know if filtering out the huge unwanted text files doesn't improve performance for you.

I think that covers all the bases. Closing since everything in the list above is either already implemented, or already tracked on our feature backlog. But please let me know if you're experiencing issues that don't match what I've stated above.