Weird Windows Search behaviour

Posted By: matthews | Mar 3rd @ 11:22 PM
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Comments: 13 | Views: 838
#Mar 3rd @ 11:22 PM
matthews
matthews

A few minutes ago I tried to do a search for one of my labs in the start menu search by typing in "lab 8". This yielded a never ending "Searching...", so I just left my start menu and went into the directory to get it myself. Afterwards I noticed everything was running incredibly slow and my hard drive indicator was stuck on, so I opened the task manager and was horrified to find that explorer.exe was using 99% of my CPU resources! A little more investigation revealed that any time I use a search phrase with a number, explorer.exe does this. I'm not sure if this is a bug or if it's running through my index and getting a hit on everything, but it's kind of annoying.

Anyone else seen this?

#Mar 4th @ 9:47 AM
PaoloM
PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

Searching on a single number is due to return you a gazillion hits Smiley

Anyways, what OS? I've just tried this on my Win7 machine and it spiked for a second and returned me a bunch of results in a very reasonable time.

Keep in mind we've changed a lot in the start menu search provider, so it may just be that we made this problem go away in Win7, but still it doesn't sound right that explorer would spike to 99% for such a long time...

#Mar 4th @ 9:58 AM
intelman
intelman
I've noticed this on Vista's search with WDS 4. I am giving up on trying to figure out how to fix it, because I am convinced it is a bug of some sort. I find that rebuilding the index one and a while seems to help. Also if you disable the throttling down of WDS it helps too (which makes no sense).

Good news is in Windows 7 Beta 1, search is beautiful, quick and basically perfect. RC1 can't get here soon enough, then RTM.
#Mar 4th @ 10:04 AM
PaoloM
PaoloM
Hypermediocrity
Rebuilding the index is not really useful. To get more meaningful results in the OP case, you could put the terms in quotes ("lab 8").
#Mar 4th @ 10:07 AM
intelman
intelman
I think I am just running into weird issues then. It really is quite strange. For reference this helped my desktop search performance.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=534809&st=0&p=588279962&#entry588279962
#Mar 4th @ 10:49 AM
PaoloM
PaoloM
Hypermediocrity
Well, we all know that Brandon is always right Smiley

Sometimes problems like this are caused by IFilters that are trying to access corrupted files. They "know" how the file should be laid out but for some reason it isn't like that and they may go in an unpredictable state, possibly with timeouts or weird loops.
#Mar 4th @ 11:19 AM
BHpaddock
BHpaddock
@matthews -

Are you running Vista SP1?  Do you have the WS4 update installed?
#Mar 4th @ 11:31 AM
intelman
intelman
I did that too, still took too long to find files I just downloaded. The registry tweak seemed to have helped though. The problem is I can't get my index to update quick enough.

Windows 7 this behavior is ideal. Download a file, search instantly picks it up, I can go to the start menu type half the name press enter and the file is opened. Or a file gets transferred to me via live mesh and I'd like to instantly search for it. I've tried a lot to get Vista to work like Windows 7, it is just impossible Sad


#Mar 4th @ 11:36 AM
PaoloM
PaoloM
Hypermediocrity
Well, that's why we make new operating systems Smiley
#Mar 4th @ 11:44 AM
intelman
intelman
I wish I were ignorant to the future. Hard to deal with what you have now when the future is much improved.

At a future date, I'd like to know what changed that made this experience so much better.
#Mar 4th @ 11:52 AM
matthews
matthews
Vista x64 SP1, Windows Search 4.0 installed via Windows Update. This happens even with the search terms in quotes. The CPU usage seems to vary; sometimes 90%, 60%, others 30% when doing this search.
#Mar 4th @ 4:23 PM
BHpaddock
BHpaddock
The gadget's "fast forward" button does the same thing as setting that registry key...
#Mar 4th @ 4:32 PM
intelman
intelman
Weird, for it just sat there with a # of files that needed indexed. "Indexing...[4]"

Just sat there for a few hours, I gave up after pressing the button a few times restarting and such. I just have bad luck I guess.
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