rg heavy disk I/O usage, rg does not like brackets and is too greedy #282852
Description
Type: Bug
Opening a folder which does have square brackets in it's path.
The folder is on Samba network, the volume is mapped to a letter. (H:\Projects...)
But I have no reason to believe this issue is limited to a network path. I can't test it on local drive, as it's NVMe, very fast and small.
My H:\Projects\ dir contains many millions of files and is multiple TB in size.
The command line is: "c:\Apps\...\ripgrep\bin\rg.exe" --files --hidden --case-sensitive --no-require-git --no-ignore-parent --follow --no-config
rp is not searching for package.json or devcontainer.json file in this case.
I tested it again on different path and pulled a small project (h:\Projects[Various Scripts]\Browser-Extension\webextensions-examples-main).
From rg process' file handles I can see rg is accessing files directly under h:\Projects\. e.g. h:\Projects\ProjectA\...
And another clue is the Current directory from which the rp is started, which is just h:\Projects\
Also tested with all extension packages disabled.
OK:
When I remove the [] from path (by renaming the dir) and repeat previous steps, rp process runs for less than 1 sec.
(h:\Projects\Various Scripts\Browser-Extension\webextensions-examples-main)
Even if there was not the above issue, I believe rp is too aggressive and might be a problem in some cases. It's running a background task and should behave as such.
rp starts with one process with several threads. But few minutes later it will spin out of control with dozens of instances. I can't even see them all as the Process Explorer gets frozen at this point.
The client PC is high on CPU usage and the NAS is nearly frozen. Samba would take minutes to accommodate another task, like to copy 20 bytes big file.
In possibly not just my case, the H:\Project\ dir is not just bigger, but it contains some cross linked and recursively linked dirs.
I don't know if this would be an issue with rg, but anyway maybe there should be a limit, or best a dialog asking if search should continue for this workspace yes/no/never/always.
Screenshots
Similar:
microsoft/vscode-remote-release#10086
vscode-icons/vscode-icons#2652
VS Code version: Code 1.106.3 (bf9252a, 2025-11-25T22:28:18.024Z)
OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631
Modes:
System Info
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| CPUs | Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz (8 x 3600) |
| GPU Status | 2d_canvas: enabled direct_rendering_display_compositor: disabled_off_ok gpu_compositing: enabled multiple_raster_threads: enabled_on opengl: enabled_on rasterization: enabled raw_draw: disabled_off_ok skia_graphite: disabled_off trees_in_viz: disabled_off video_decode: enabled video_encode: enabled vulkan: disabled_off webgl: enabled webgl2: enabled webgpu: enabled webnn: disabled_off |
| Load (avg) | undefined |
| Memory (System) | 31.91GB (13.67GB free) |
| Process Argv | |
| Screen Reader | no |
| VM | 67% |