987893 - Warn and/or disable Windows Search Service for objdir

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

The Windows Search Service may index contents of the object directory. If it's like OS X, indexing may be aggressive and cause excessive CPU usage during or immediately after builds, making the experience bad.

We should look into programmatically detecting and warning if the Windows Search Service is indexing object directories. If possible, we may want to disable it automatically.

There is an SDK for the Windows Search Service. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965362%28v=vs.85%29.aspx. I haven't looked in detail, but I'm sure there's a way to look up and set indexing exclusions.

Ideally we could do everything in Python using ctypes. Worst case we can write some C/C++ and either build that tool as part of the build or ship a binary in MozillaBuild.

First thing's first: we should see if this is actually a problem. Perhaps we could add probes in |mach build| (similar to bug 844204) to detect and warn on excessive CPU usage?