Configuring Search and Indexing Options (part 2) - Monitoring the Index, and Tuning Indexer Performance & Other Index Maintenance Tasks

2. Monitoring the Index, and Tuning Indexer Performance

The status message at the top of the Indexing Options dialog box offers real-time updates on what the indexer is doing at the moment. "Indexing complete" means there are no pending tasks. The text lists the number of items (files, folders, e-mail messages, and so on) that are currently in the index.

"Indexing paused" means the service has temporarily stopped all indexing tasks; you'll see this message if you check the indexer status shortly after you start the computer, as the default setting for the Windows Search service is Automatic (Delayed Start).

If indexing tasks are currently under way, the status message will display an increase or decrease in the number of items indexed, as new, changed, and deleted files are processed. The indexer is designed to throttle itself whenever it detects that the system is working on other, presumably more important tasks. As a result, you'll most likely be told that "Indexing speed is reduced due to user activity" when you first check.

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 thousand documents, for instance), you'll see the indexing speed pick up dramatically after you keep your hands off the keyboard and mouse for a minute or so.

The exact speed of indexing depends on a variety of factors, starting with the speed of your CPU and hard disk or disk subsystem and also factoring in the number, size, and complexity of documents and whether their full contents are being indexed. Unfortunately, the status message in the Indexing Options dialog box doesn't include a progress bar and doesn't indicate how many files are yet to be indexed, so there's no easy way to tell whether the current task is barely under way or nearly complete. If you haven't recently added any new folders to the index but have simply been changing a few files in the course of normal work, the index should stay close to complete (assuming you've ever had a complete index).

Some websites for performance-obsessed Windows users complain about the performance hit that Windows Search causes; some even recommend disabling the Windows Search service to improve overall system performance. We recommend that you leave it running. In our experience, the Windows Search service uses only a small percentage of available CPU resources even at its busiest. The indexing service is specifically designed to back off when you use your computer for other activities, switching to low-priority input/output (I/O) and allowing foreground I/O tasks, such as opening the Start menu, to execute first. When Windows 7 first builds its index, or if you copy a large number of files to the system at once, the indexing can take a long time and cause some hard-disk chattering, but you shouldn't notice any impact on performance.

Windows Explorer accesses the index directly, so even if the indexer is busy processing new and changed files 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 Windows Explorer or Microsoft Office 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.)

3. Other Index Maintenance Tasks

The Indexing Options dialog box is also your gateway to buttons and check boxes that let you rebuild a corrupted index, change the location where the index stores its data, add folders to the index, change how the index deals with particular file types, and so on. To perform any of these maintenance tasks, display the Index Settings tab of the Advanced Options dialog box (shown in Figure 4).

It's not supposed to happen, but if your index stops working properly (or if you just performed major file maintenance and you want to give the index a fresh start), click Rebuild, under the Troubleshooting heading. Then give your system time to re-create the index.

For security reasons, encrypted files are not included in the index by default. If you use Encrypting File System and you need those files indexed, select Index Encrypted Files under the File Settings head.

By default, the index files live in subfolders of %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Search. If you install a faster hard disk on your computer, you might be able to improve search performance by moving the index files to the new disk. Simply type or paste the full path of the folder you want to use in the Current Location box. Be prepared to restart your computer and wait while the index is rebuilt.

Although this option sounds like an appealing performance tweak, we recommend you think twice before trying it. The actual difference in performance is likely to be minor, and you can expect to encounter problems re-establishing the index if you have to restore your system drive from a backup and you don't also restore the volume containing the index.