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
    2022-05-14T20:10:18+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.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-05-13T19:11:31+00:00

    Well my Indexing finally broke about a week ago. Now it's back to doing 10 files every several seconds with abnormally high CPU usage of the process.

    Going to try the PluginResourceData registry tweaks and see if that helps. That sounds less painful than reinstalling Windows 11 every time Indexing breaks down.

    What would be even less painful is if Microsoft fixed this bug.

    Edit: Adding ShutoffThreshold made no difference, but removing the huge number of keys (90 MB when exported as a reg file!) from under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\PluginResourceData restored Indexing performance. Those keys getting cleared is probably the reason reinstalling Windows also helps. Obviously it's only temporary since it's going to fill up and **** out again within a few months, so maybe a scheduled task to clear it out every month or so will work as a temporary fix.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-05-05T10:47:02+00:00

    Yes! I had the same issue, this resolves it. I tried many things and spent 4 or 5 hours with level 1 then level 2 support at microsoft - their answer was 'wait'.

    I just did this, I'm up to 1.15M indexed items (first 1M took 96 hours) and its going around 50-100x the speed it was.

    Thanks!

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-05-05T09:39:33+00:00

    Many thank!

    I have now done that and will see how it goes.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-05-05T09:19:23+00:00

    You have to set the ShutoffThreshold Key as described, too. Otherwise the problem will be back soon. Deleting everything just postpones the problem.

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