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
    2022-07-16T19:59:49+00:00

    Yes, I found a solution

    1. Create Windows 11 Installation Media on USB - Download Windows 11 (microsoft.com)
    2. Click on setup.exe from the USB
    3. Do an install keeping apps and files.

    When the install was finished indexing worked great.

    One thing I did before the install was to remove all the indexing locations (until "index these locations" is empty) and the click 'rebuild'. I did this to clear any previous indexing information. I have no idea whether this actually does anything but if you want to ensure you do exactly what I did maybe do this as well.

    Since then, the PC has been fine. It indexed all of my emails and files in 4-5 hours.

    After months of tearing my hair out with no search functionality whatsoever in Outlook, trying to rebuild the index but it going so slow that it never even got close to finishing, then having Microsoft support dial in and do the same as what I had already done.... finally, this solution has worked! It hasn't finished indexing yet, but in the time it took to do index about 15 files previously, it has now done 75,000. I didn't do any registry edits, as other posts have suggested, just the solution with reinstalling Windows 11. Thank you so much!!

    Hi Helenrc,

    Thanks for your suggestion. I've tried é everything until exhaustion with no success.

    As in my company we have Office 365 Enterprise Version and pay a lot of money to Microsoft for the yearly licenses we have got a Microsoft engineer to phone our IT department and help.

    Even him with quick access app didn't figure out how to resolve the problem.

    Then I saw your suggestion and our IT team decided to give it a go.

    All Windows 11 version were installed on all PCs from scratch and now indexing is working fine 👍.

    Thanks for your help

    Dr. Paulo Maia Gonçalves

    Attorney at Law

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-07-16T06:35:05+00:00

    Yes, I found a solution

    1. Create Windows 11 Installation Media on USB - Download Windows 11 (microsoft.com)
    2. Click on setup.exe from the USB
    3. Do an install keeping apps and files.

    When the install was finished indexing worked great.

    One thing I did before the install was to remove all the indexing locations (until "index these locations" is empty) and the click 'rebuild'. I did this to clear any previous indexing information. I have no idea whether this actually does anything but if you want to ensure you do exactly what I did maybe do this as well.

    Since then, the PC has been fine. It indexed all of my emails and files in 4-5 hours.

    After months of tearing my hair out with no search functionality whatsoever in Outlook, trying to rebuild the index but it going so slow that it never even got close to finishing, then having Microsoft support dial in and do the same as what I had already done.... finally, this solution has worked! It hasn't finished indexing yet, but in the time it took to do index about 15 files previously, it has now done 75,000. I didn't do any registry edits, as other posts have suggested, just the solution with reinstalling Windows 11. Thank you so much!!

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-07-15T17:09:37+00:00

    I think I asked too soon. Deleting the PluginResourceData key cleared up the error I had stopping the Windows Search service. I wasn't indexing very much better, so I went back and deleted the data in C:\ProgramData\Windows\Search. It's now indexing faster than it has in days... over 25k items in just a few minutes.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-07-15T16:40:45+00:00

    My reindex after a rebuilt is also painfully slow. About 215 items indexed overnight. I haven't seen any mention of an error in the application log that I'm seeing if I try to stop or restart the Windows Search service. Anybody else seeing this?

    Faulting application name: SearchIndexer.exe, version: 7.0.22000.778, time stamp: 0x2c4bbadf

    Faulting module name: MSSRCH.DLL, version: 7.0.22000.778, time stamp: 0x41763665

    Exception code: 0xc0000005

    Fault offset: 0x00000000000e69d0

    Faulting process id: 0x107c

    Faulting application start time: 0x01d897bd4ac40422

    Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\SearchIndexer.exe

    Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\MSSRCH.DLL

    Report Id: c70ed0f8-5425-4efd-bb9e-67ab2160ffc4

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-07-13T14:56:39+00:00

    I had the same issue.

    After trying everything, I used Procmon and saw that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\PluginResourceData was read continuously...

    I decided to stop Search service (before disable the restart) and delete this key

    Then after the restart, the speed has dramaticly increased, to return to a normal way !

    Not sure about the impact of this change but in case of doubt, you can save regitry settings before.

    This seems to have worked, thanks for posting! That registry key was just loaded with **** I mean like a lot so don't know what was going on with it but deleting it had immediate results 23,000 items index in about a minute after waiting for an entire day and got maybe 10,000.

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