Full scan


I am conducting a full scan on a 2012 iMac desktop with 1 terabyte of memory and the latest version of OS Sierra. The machine is disconnected from the internet and all peripherals. It has 800+ gigabytes worth of files on the hard disk.


Altogether I'd guess that there are 2 million odd files on the computer. So far the scan has taken over eighteen hours to scan 700,000 files, and it is continuing. The progress indicator hasn't moved for most of the time.


Something seems not to be working. But what is it?