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

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.

0 comments

142 answers

Sort by: Oldest
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. 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 ...

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. 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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2022-02-25T00:21:46+00:00

    Same here. MS needs to get this to the PG and rebuild the service. This is a big issue for anyone in an enterprise environment with large ost DBs.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2022-02-25T23:22:15+00:00

    It's really getting quite bad. I've done the reinstall OS fix a couple of times, but Windows eventually is unable to keep up with the indexing. Now I more or less have to accept my CPU spiking to 60-70 degrees and staying there for long periods (hours) of time with fans at full blast while the indexing update process completes.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2022-02-25T23:49:49+00:00

    As I stated above, the Product Group ("PG") must recode this module. End of story. Nothing should work like this or take such an effort to remediate. I build software and firmware for the gaming industry and I can tell you, this is broken.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments