Auto Refresh causes the editor to be laggy and spikes CPU usage

Target Platforms Desktop
1

After getting Unity3D Linux alpha up and running in linux mint 17.2 I experienced an extremely laggy editor that made working impossible. This may be the same issue as in: High CPU Usage! - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions

However, despite the laggy editor and the high CPU I had a blast of performance in game testing mode. Game runs smoothly, even Scene View responded quickly. The problem only occured when clicking something else in the Editor.

I noticed a weird behavior in the Editor.log:

Refresh: detecting if any assets need to be imported or removed ... Refresh: elapses 1,027872 seconds
Refreshing native plugins compatible for Editor in 9,38 ms, found 0 plugins.

----- Total AssetImport time: 4,982233s, AssetImport time: 0,000000s, Asset hashing: 0,000000s [0 B, 0,000000 mb/s]

Refresh: detecting if any assets need to be imported or removed ... Refresh: elapses 1,010936 seconds
Refreshing native plugins compatible for Editor in 8,86 ms, found 0 plugins.

----- Total AssetImport time: 5,002625s, AssetImport time: 0,000001s, Asset hashing: 0,000000s [0 B, 0,000000 mb/s]

Refresh: detecting if any assets need to be imported or removed ... Refresh: elapses 1,065694 seconds
Refreshing native plugins compatible for Editor in 9,79 ms, found 0 plugins.

----- Total AssetImport time: 4,968740s, AssetImport time: 0,000000s, Asset hashing: 0,000000s [0 B, 0,000000 mb/s]

Refresh: detecting if any assets need to be imported or removed ... Refresh: elapses 1,043369 seconds
Refreshing native plugins compatible for Editor in 8,94 ms, found 0 plugins.

----- Total AssetImport time: 5,060155s, AssetImport time: 0,000001s, Asset hashing: 0,000000s [0 B, 0,000000 mb/s]

Refresh: detecting if any assets need to be imported or removed ... Refresh: elapses 1,021346 seconds
Refreshing native plugins compatible for Editor in 10,17 ms, found 0 plugins.

----- Total AssetImport time: 5,053876s, AssetImport time: 0,000000s, Asset hashing: 0,000000s [0 B, 0,000000 mb/s]

Refresh: detecting if any assets need to be imported or removed ... Refresh: elapses 1,011864 seconds
Refreshing native plugins compatible for Editor in 10,57 ms, found 0 plugins.

----- Total AssetImport time: 5,066467s, AssetImport time: 0,000001s, Asset hashing: 0,000000s [0 B, 0,000000 mb/s]

Refresh: detecting if any assets need to be imported or removed ... Refresh: elapses 1,024878 seconds
Refreshing native plugins compatible for Editor in 8,65 ms, found 0 plugins.

[...]

Seems like the engine periodically tries to detect if any assets need to be imported or removed. I guess this is common behavior needed for scanning for file directoy changes and adding new assets.

So I turned “Auto Refresh” off in preferences and WOAH. My favorite engine runs.

It was unusable before and maybe this helps people getting it to run.

Any suggestions on how to fix this? Or maybe it’s caused because my project is located on a ntfs partition?

If I learn something new I’ll add it here.

2

It seems likely to be related - this depends on project size, but for example, the Standard Assets project has a nothing-to-do refresh time of around 0.05s on my workstation’s (ext4) disk, where yours is showing about 100x that.

This happens any time the main editor window regains focus.

3

I tested today and the AssetImport time takes much less time (0,5s instead of ~5s) if the project is located on ext4 instead of ntfs.