Indexing Broken in Windows 11 (Painfully Slow At Best)

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.

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 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.

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.

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.