Services VS background

[mintmag]

What's the difference between running in the background and everything service?

[horst.epp]

What's the difference between running in the background and everything service?

The Everything service only provides the rights to access all files.
Running Everything in the background updates the index and avoids delays on starting a search.

[raccoon]

The "Everything Service" is a second everything.exe process that runs as an elevated 'System Service' while the main everything.exe process runs as a 'regular user'. All this process does is grant Everything access to administrator privileges, but selectively in a controlled manner. This is contrary wise to just running Everything 'As Administrator', no secondary everything.exe process, which has the usually undesirable effect of running all files and requests As Admin instead of As Regular User. From a security stand point, running Everything 'As Administrator' is unsafe and allowing the System Service controlled administrator access is best practices in Windows' user/admin security environment.

The "Running in background" option just means that the Everything window (user interface) is minimized to the system tray instead of minimized to the task bar. That is, the window is actually closed and destroyed (not minimized) but the program stays running and responsive to hotkeys. If you disable this option, then the program actually quits/terminates when you close an Everything window.

The two options are unrelated.

@void: Question: When Everything is exited, why doesn't the service process also terminate? It is certainly possible/normal to signal the service to terminate, and to restart it without having to request a UAC prompt the next time Everything is run.

[horst.epp]

@void: Question: When Everything is exited, why doesn't the service process also terminate? It is certainly possible/normal to signal the service to terminate, and to restart it without having to request a UAC prompt the next time Everything is run.

I'm not void but I guess the answer is simple.
There is only one Everything service regardless of the number of Everything Instances.
So stopping Everything in one instance would take away the service for all other running instances.

[raccoon]

I suppose that makes sense, except that other registered services know how to "manually" start and stop when there are no processes using them. If there are no other Everything instances running, then it seems reasonable that the service be stopped. All very modern and tidy.

[void]

Everything Service:

The Everything Service simply allows the Everything Search client to index your NTFS volumes and monitor your USN Journals for file system changes.

The Everything Service is stateless.
It is the Everything Search client that maintains your index.

The Everything service will use about 1MB of ram and no noticeable CPU usage.
The Everything service can use more RAM during indexing. However, this should only occur once.

The Everything Service is required to index NTFS volumes when running Everything as a standard user.
Running the Everything search client as an administrator will reduce security.

Installing the Everything Service is recommended for improved security.



Run in background

This will keep the Everything Search client running in the background.
Everything will keep your index up to date while running in the background.
Disabling this option can make Everything slow to start as it has to process many file system changes before searching.

If you exit out of the Everything Search client, the Everything Service will do nothing.

Running Everything in the background is recommended for faster searching on startup.



There should be two processes running.
The Everything search client and the Everything Service.

@void: Question: When Everything is exited, why doesn't the service process also terminate? It is certainly possible/normal to signal the service to terminate, and to restart it without having to request a UAC prompt the next time Everything is run.

Mainly for simplicity.
The Everything Service is always running.
Everything works best if the Everything Search client is also running in the background.
It's another second the user has to wait for the Everything Service to start.
The Everything Service doesn't consume any noticeable RAM or CPU usage during normal operation.

Admin privileges are currently required to start the Everything Service.
I will consider allowing non-admin users to start the Everything Service and only running the Everything Service when required.



An alternative to running the Everything Service is to launch an Everything process with -svc as an admin:
Everything.exe -svc

[mintmag]

I just discovered that unless run as administrator is enabled, everything won't search mounted images such as Macrium Reflect