Indexing Broken in Windows 11 (Painfully Slow At Best)

Anonymous
2021-12-05T01:10:52+00:00

Hello

I have upgraded to Windows 11 Pro on two different laptops, and both have the same issue with indexing. It is painfully slow and then usually resets itself after a couple of weeks.

Both PCs are high-end laptops with Core i9 mobile CPUs (1 x 6 core and the other 8 core). Both run 2 x NVMe 1TB drives. Both have 64GB RAM.

Both run MS Office and I use Outlook for email connected to same IMAP accounts on both. My docs, pics, music and work-related files are all stored on OneDrive and accessed from both PCs (OneDrive is set to keep local copies on both PCs for fast access).

Windows is being asked to index around 250,000 files and 80,000 emails and calendar appts. Windows 10 used to accomplish this task in 6-8 hours max.

Windows 11 takes nearly two days just to index the emails. It can take up to three weeks to index the lot and then some folders simply refuse to be indexed. Then, after a couple more weeks it will eventually lose the lot and indexing has to start from scratch again (on both PCs)

I have tried:

Disabling backoff via registry so indexing never pauses

Only adding one location at a time to let it slowly build up (e.g., add only Outlook and when that finishes add a folder)

Rebuilding the index

Storing the index in different location

Search and Indexing Trouble-shooter

Nothing fixes the issue

Any help appreciated.

Cheers

Mick

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-06-23T07:24:55+00:00

    I have the same problem (again!) I did delete the register key. It did solve the problem (temporary) Now I disabled windows search completely. This is an example of Microsoft's ability to solve problems...

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-06-23T05:25:00+00:00

    Hi Mikey,

    Did you try clearing the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\PluginResourceData?

    That fixed it for me, but i haven't upgraded to the last Windows update yet. I got me worried.

    Hi Phil,

    Yes, I have tried that one.

    Thankfully everything is finally indexed again and to give MS some credit, since the latest update my pdf and word doc contents are finally being indexed on both PCs.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-06-22T16:17:42+00:00

    Does anyone know what those keys actually do? Can I delete them without rebuilding the index or are they important information for the index?

    Once I had deleted those keys, my index rebuilt to more than 414,000 items in about 12 hours. Acceptable speed.

    However, about 40,000 items were left as "Pending." Those items are slowly being dealt with (a few every few seconds) and that number is slowly going down (by 10,000 in two weeks). However, the number of indexed items is not going up. So it seems like these pending items aren't really needing indexing at all.

    I honestly have no idea what the keys do but they don't seem to be critical to Search. Looking at the contents, they seem to be related to CPU and memory usage prioritization or logging or something.

    The index itself is located in a file (Windows.edb) so deleting PluginResourceData should not reset your indexing progress, and the keys get recreated slowly over time. Mine has grown back to about 22 MB now (when exported as a .reg file), but indexing is still keeping up with my ~1.3 million indexed files. I think it begins to really slow down at the 60-80 MB mark which seems to happen every 2-3 months for me. So just deleting the PluginResourceData and everything under it every 2 months or so keeps indexing working for me. Still pretty embarrassing for Microsoft that they seem completely clueless to this problem.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-06-20T23:28:53+00:00

    Hi Mikey,

    Did you try clearing the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\PluginResourceData?

    That fixed it for me, but i haven't upgraded to the last Windows update yet. I got me worried.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-06-20T09:48:23+00:00

    A quicker (and cheaper) solution might be something like Copernic Desktop Search. This is what I was using before I discovered that Windows 10 indexing did all I needed. Copernic did the job fine and, as indexing is all it does, Copernic will be doing all they can to make sure it works on each new iteration of Windows. (whereas who knows if Microsoft is doing anything at all to fix this).

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