Indexing Broken in Windows 11 (Painfully Slow At Best)

Anonymous

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

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142 answers

Anonymous

2022-01-10T18:24:31+00:00

Oh, thank you, I used copy & paste and did not check the commands. My mistake.
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Anonymous

2022-01-10T18:08:01+00:00
I had the same problem. The reinstallation seems too much work for me.

The following helped me:

PowerShell: dism.exe /online /disable-feature /feature-name=SearchEngine-Client-Package, (reboot necessary).

via Services.msc I stopped "Windows Search" and then quickly deleted the files under C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search.

PowerShell: dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename=SearchEngine-Client-Pack, (no reboot required).

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

Good luck.
I did everything as described but unfortunately this didn't work for me. Curious to hear what others have to say.

Oh and if you want us to copy-paste commands into PowerShell/Terminal, please at least make sure those commands are correct. Yours include typos.

The correct commands are:

dism /online /disable-feature /featurename:SearchEngine-Client-Package

dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:SearchEngine-Client-Package
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Anonymous

2022-01-10T08:38:10+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.
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Anonymous

2022-01-10T08:20:05+00:00

Any news about potential fix?
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Anonymous

2022-01-08T00:44:57+00:00

Thanks mikeyjames1967.

Yes, it works. I could not find solution earlier, had hit lot of trials and errors.

It has started indexing in outlook and hopefully the outlook search will also work.

Regards
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