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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
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Replying again to warn people. My indexing has been fine since I fixed it. Just installed 22H2 update and it has messed with the indexing again, completely resetting it, and I am back to sqaure one with painfully slow indexing.
Why would MS have an update wipe your indexing completely? Just baffles me.
Yes, I found a solution
- Create Windows 11 Installation Media on USB - Download Windows 11 (microsoft.com)
- Click on setup.exe from the USB
- Do an install keeping apps and files.
When the install was finished indexing worked great.
One thing I did before the install was to remove all the indexing locations (until "index these locations" is empty) and the click 'rebuild'. I did this to clear any previous indexing information. I have no idea whether this actually does anything but if you want to ensure you do exactly what I did maybe do this as well.
Since then, the PC has been fine. It indexed all of my emails and files in 4-5 hours.
Hi Mr. Mikey
i tried to speed up indexing process as per your suggestion. But, no improvement noticed. Could you please suggest alternate solution.
Thanks in advance
Problem is my index takes 36+ hours to rebuild so I'm not sure how viable this is for me. Its about 2mil items including a large number of very large files.
It's too bad there's no way (that I know of) to take a snapshot of the index & related files. Its possible keeping track of what is still to be indexed might make that impossible - unless that information is included somewhere in those files.
I am seriously considering downgrading back to win 10 because of how much this impacts my workflow.
I hear you and I know exactly what you mean. It beggars belief how this and things like Outlook are so broken and yet seem to get so little attention. There must be a whole class of users that are so different to me.
Anyway, I still have this problem, and stopping the service, clearing the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\PluginResourceData, and then restarting the service made this work again.
A few days ago indexing seemed to get stuck so I went ahead and repeated and boom, its back up.
I dont know what the negative of this is, if anything. It can presumably only affect the indexing which doesnt work without it.
I thought I had waited long enough move to Win 11...apparently not.
TL;DR I was wrong. Same problem.
Search Indexing is critical for me & something I use all day long. I have 20 years' worth of documents, emails, presentations, raw code, etc. that could have what I'm looking for anywhere or nowhere at all. At any time, I may need to find something within the entirety of those files or to know that something is specifically not there. Roughly 100gb just in Outlook files.
Typical search(s): 45-75 seconds, or much longer. With indexing: <5 seconds. If I get lots of hits, maybe 10 seconds.
Some searches would have to be broken up to multiple different parts of the system: RegEdit to search the registry, Win search to search all documents, multiple Outlook searches, individual database searches and on & on. Or indexed takes me <10 seconds. That means that when I'm on the phone with a client (or anyone else) I likely have the indexed search result for the topic of their question before they finish asking the question. Or I can find that 1 sentence that was "in there, somewhere" from 15 years ago but never made it in to a finalized document.
As the poster has said Win 11 indexing looked fine upon install. I recall the 1st indexing took about 2x longer (may have been longer; finished overnight) than I was used to but chalked it up to it being the 1st indexing. I didn't notice an issue for about a week. Then everything in this thread came true.
Part of why indexing is so useful is that I don't know what file might contain what I'm looking for. Could turn out to be anything, even Windows or program files. When it takes 1-2 seconds to find out if your search target even exists, your workflow is not broken. When I know its going to take roughly 1-5 minutes to search though everything in order to hope that there is NOT something there dampens my use of searching at all. If I choose to include the entire registry this process is basically a deal killer.
Off to find a 3rd party tool...again.
P.S. Sorry to readers for the long rant. But Microsoft? Come on! No wonder people look at me cockeyed when I tell them I've used indexed search since the day it was offered. Most don't know what I'm talking about and that's 100% b/c issues like this that prevent typical users from ever having an interest in a tool (that you already build!) that could save them significant time & headache.
