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how to speed up indexing?

Windows 7 on ThinkPads
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Marin85
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how to speed up indexing?

#1 Post by Marin85 » Wed Jun 09, 2010 7:52 pm

Hi,

while many advise to disable indexing in windows 7 to "improve performance", I was wondering if there is some trick/hack to speed up windows indexing! Right now I am in the process of rebuilding the index as I have changed the default locations to the locations I really need to be indexed, and this SearchFilterHost.exe is really bugging me with its ridiculous cpu usage ~40-50% (and even more at times). Now, I am really in the mood to express my feelings about M$ in a very non-gentleman way, but I won´t do so as it would not change anything... The thing is, I know that SearchIndexer.exe is the process that performs the indexing of my files, but it is also accompanied by this freak SearchFilterHost.exe for some reason. As long as I am doing something on my computer, "indexing speed is reduced due to user activity", yet SearchFilterHost.exe is eating my cpu regardless (in other words, it is consuming resources without actually doing much), unless indexing is finished, which, however, won´t happen anytime soon as I need my ThinkPad every day. Checkmate! So, it is logical to ask if there is a way to speed up indexing regardless of user activity, e.g. by increasing its process priority or some similar hack. Better spend an hour or two with 100% cpu usage than weeks with 50% cpu usage.

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

Marin

PS: Yes, I have already done some google search, but except the useless, pretending-to-be-geeky advice to disable indexing (complete myth IMO) I wasn´t able to find out much. I am almost sure there must be some registry hack to increase the priority of indexing.
IBM Lenovo Z61p | 15.4'' WUXGA | Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 2x 2.16GHz | 4 GB Kingston HyperX | Hitachi 7K500 500 GB + WD 1TB (USB) | ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 | ThinkPad Atheros a/b/g | Analog Devices AD1981HD | Win 7 x86 + ArchLinux 2009.08 x64 (number crunching)

AMATX
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Re: how to speed up indexing?

#2 Post by AMATX » Thu Jun 10, 2010 4:16 am

I don't know how to speed up indexing, but if you're mainly concerned about the cpu being used right NOW, how about opening up windows task mgr and lowing the cpu priority on the module doing the indexing? That would move it more into the background where it wouldn't interfere so much with your daily cpu usage. Then, during idle times when you're not using the laptop, more cpu would return to the indexing routine.

Open task mgr, click on 'processes' tab, highlight the module name, right click on that highlighted name, select 'Set Priority', then pick something lower, such as 'Below Normal' or 'Low'.

Not the best-est answer :) but a possible work around...

Marin85
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Re: how to speed up indexing?

#3 Post by Marin85 » Fri Jun 11, 2010 9:28 am

Thanks for the great idea! It turned out, SearchFilterHost.exe is set per default to low priority, while SearchIndexer.exe runs per default in normal priority. So, I put both of them to real-time priority (above above high), and the result was that indexing was completed in idle mode for less than one and half hours, starting from ~25k items and ending at ~85k items! While user activity apperently still limits indexing speed, the performance of indexing at idle improved significantly. However, the priority of both processes eventually reverts to the default levels (watchdog or something), so one needs to watch it all the time to put priorities back to high levels. Also, increasing the priority above normal causes terrible dpc lattencies, so any music playback becomes unbearable and impacts overall performance to the point that some websites are not loaded correctly, while the cpu usage stays the same at 40-50% as before. Now, the disturbing part is that although indexing reported to be completed, it actually wasn´t as it found some new 2k items in my documents folder an hour later... (to clarify I didn´t do any changes to the contents of that folder in the mean time), so everything stared all over again, then again reported to have finished, and an hour or so later, indexing started again, accompanied with 40-50% cpu usage by the SearchFilterHostage.exe. Result: annoyed user, indexing completely turned off, user looking for 3rd party search/indexing solution...

Cheers,

Marin
IBM Lenovo Z61p | 15.4'' WUXGA | Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 2x 2.16GHz | 4 GB Kingston HyperX | Hitachi 7K500 500 GB + WD 1TB (USB) | ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 | ThinkPad Atheros a/b/g | Analog Devices AD1981HD | Win 7 x86 + ArchLinux 2009.08 x64 (number crunching)

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