June 5th, 2008
Fixing Windows Vista, Part 5: Faster, smarter search
<– Continued from previous page
Managing search performance
Occasionally, I read a complaint about the performance hit that Windows Search causes on Vista systems. Invariably, when I look further into these cases, I find the cause is elsewhere. (You can see for yourself by using the Disk section of Resource Monitor, as I describe in part 3 of this series.) The reality is that the indexing service is specifically designed to back off when you use your computer for other activities, switching to low-priority I/O and allowing foreground I/O tasks, such as opening the Start menu, to execute first. When Windows Vista first builds its index after installation, or if you copy a large number of files to the system at once, the indexing can take a long time, but you shouldn’t notice any impact on performance.
To monitor the current status of the index, open the Indexing Options dialog box (the most convenient way to do this is to click Start, click Control Panel, and type index in the search box in the upper right corner of the Control Panel window. The status message at the top of the page tells you what’s going on with the index in real time. On my current system, the index is up to date, so I see this message:
If the indexing service is currently working on some files, you’ll see this message instead:
That message indicates that the indexing service has backed off in response to your activity and is operating at a fraction of its normal speed. If the number of files to be indexed is big enough (if you copied a folder full of several hundred documents, for instance), you’ll see the indexing speed pick up dramatically if you keep your hands off the keyboard and mouse for a minute or so.
At any given time, the SearchIndexer service uses only a small percentage of available CPU resources. Using Task Manager or Process Explorer, you can see the status of the SearchIndexer process; if it’s actively engaged in indexing, you should see two additional child processes, SearchProtocolHost and SearchFilterHost. The indexing processes are used to create the index, but not to access it. Windows Explorer access the index directly, so even if the indexer is busy it shouldn’t affect the speed of a search operation. In normal operation, retrieving search results from even a very large index should take no more than a few seconds. If you see hang-ups in either Explorer or Outlook when performing a search, you’ll need to look at the operation of the program itself to find the problem. (Outlook 2007 add-ins, for example, can dramatically slow down the program, and because Outlook runs as a child process of Explorer.exe they can also affect Windows Explorer.)
If you’re impatient, you might want the search indexer to work at full speed after you copy or move a large number of files to an indexed location. There’s a group policy setting you can adjust to disable the “back off” logic, but it’s far easier in Vista to use the Windows Search Indexer gadget created by Microsoft developer Brandon Paddock. (The gadget works under the original version of Windows Search, but the Index Now feature requires Windows Search 4.0.)
As you can see, the small, lightweight gadget shows how many files are currently being indexed. If no indexing is in process, the message displays the text “Index up-to-date.”) The four buttons along the bottom of the gadget allow you to control how indexing works. The button at the right side opens the Indexing Options control Panel. The group of three buttons on the left allow you to pause, restart, or accelerate indexing. The third (Index Now) button disables the back-off logic and allows indexing to proceed as a foreground task, which comes in handy when you want to quickly rebuild the index or add a large number of new files.
Next week, I’m going to begin a new series of tips for Windows Vista. As part of that series, I’ll explain how to tweak Search settings to match the way you work, and how to use searches more effectively. Stay tuned!
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Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/05/08
