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
    2022-02-16T18:42:57+00:00

    I reinstalled my Win11 Pro on top of the existing Win11 as advised earlier in this thread and rebuilt the index.

    The indexing speed improved: 4000+ Office Outlook16 items with attachments were indexed within an hour.

    My 1TB SSD system drive indexed in a couple hours ( about 200,000 items). The other 2TB HDD took another hour.

    Currently I see 366,947 index items.

    One weird thing: there were over 700,000 index items right after upgrading to Win11. It seems that the upgrade from Win10 to Win11 doubled the index contents.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-02-16T12:32:18+00:00

    I have the same issue. Indexing is extremely slow and yet fully loads a whole core, even while I'm actively working, of my 4-core Surface Book 3 13,5" (which has no active cooling which makes this constant high CPU load even worse as it leads to throttling).

    Try using Teams and Miro while indexing already takes a whole core away from you - the device becomes completely unusable. Indexing speed is about 5 files/minute and I'll have about 250.000 items to index (amount of indexed items before I did a index reset to see if that helps - it did not).

    I'll try the resolutions mentioned here like refreshing the installation. Yet, this is something MS should urgently fix. It's not that this is the only Windows process that seems to escalate on CPU usage frequently, it's just by far the worst one. Makes Windows unusable on low-wattage CPUs and fanless systems. Those M1 Macs are becoming really attractive to me ...

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-02-14T20:31:07+00:00

    Just adding that I too experienced this.

    My guess is that this affects a huge number of people, but few have noticed because they haven't indexed that much data, don't do a lot of searches or simply haven't checked the indexing status. It took me at least a month to notice.

    After upgrading from Win10 to 11, indexing service was using >7% CPU, and indexing was extremely slow. You could see the number of indexed files slowly creep up by a dozen at a time at best and disk usage was almost at zero even with backoff disabled. None of the standard fixes like rebuilding the index etc. worked.

    I'm running a fairly decent system (Ryzen 3800X, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB WD Blue NVMe drive) so it shouldn't be this slow.

    I opted to do a clean install of Win11 (good opportunity to start fresh) and indexing was much faster. It finished indexing 330k files in a few hours at most. Number of indexed files were jumping up by several hundred at a time or more, and the indexing service was actually showing meaningful amounts of disk activity. I hope this isn't temporary like some reported. I will try to add some more folders to index later but I'm kind of scared to touch it in case it bugs out again.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-02-13T19:34:24+00:00

    I want to add another report that this worked and I did not lose any program settings. Indexing speed went from 1 file every 10 seconds to hundreds every 10 seconds. Thank you.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-02-08T19:28:32+00:00

    I had the same problem. The reinstallation seems too much work for me.

    The following helped me:

    1. PowerShell: dism.exe /online /disable-feature /feature-name=SearchEngine-Client-Package, (reboot necessary).
    2. via Services.msc I stopped "Windows Search" and then quickly deleted the files under C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search.
    3. PowerShell: dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename=SearchEngine-Client-Pack, (no reboot required).

    The index is as fast as it was before...

    Good luck.

    DietmarP,

    I tried your solution (with the corrected command lines). I had to disable Windows Search to be able to delete the Data folder. I re-enabled it.
    Looking at the Indexing Status after about 3 minutes, it only had 305 files indexed and pending 1165.
    I guess I will, sadly, try the install/update fix next.

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