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Groups > comp.sys.mac.advocacy > #136405
| From | Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> |
|---|---|
| Newsgroups | comp.sys.mac.advocacy, alt.comp.os.windows-10, alt.comp.os.windows-11 |
| Subject | Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing |
| Date | 2025-08-09 23:28 -0400 |
| Organization | A noiseless patient Spider |
| Message-ID | <10793lo$1lome$1@dont-email.me> (permalink) |
| References | <1078llp$1he7o$3@dont-email.me> |
Cross-posted to 3 groups.
On 08/09/25 19:30, Alan wrote:
> I'm going some tech support for my brother today, and that's meant looking "under the hood" of his Windows 10 machine.
>
> And it is astounding how poorly Windows handles indexing content.
>
> I had to uninstall OneDrive and set it up again from scratch and in the course of that I moved the contents that had previously been synchronized to two folders with "(Old)" added to make sure that nothing got lost when we did it.
>
> And I wasn't surprised when resetting his connections to his OneDrive store and the company Sharepoint store set off a flurry of indexing. I wasn't even surprised that that took a bit of time to finish; I was re-downloading a lot of files which from the perspective of Windows, all needed to be indexed anew.
>
> What was completely surprising was that simply moving the those two "Old" folders immediately caused Windows to re-index that content! I decided to clean up the two separate "Old" stores into a single folder, and all of a sudden, the indexing which was at 0 in Settings:Search:Searching Windows
>
> Windows isn't smart enough to recognize that these are all files that its already indexed and they're now just in a new location!
>
> About 80,000 files were move about 30 minutes ago, and the re-indexing isn't even 25% done!
>
> If I do a similar thing on macOS, it's done almost before the files have finished the move.
As a surprise for you, the people in the Windows groups
you copied in, don't actually recommended the Federated Search.
The model is pretty easy to understand. The NTFS USN Journal file
(NTFS is a journaled file system with a playback journal), every
time *any* file operation is done, a record is added to a FIFO queue
of events. For example, I can createfile(test.txt), writefile(256KB, "test.txt"),
commit("test.txt") and so on. I have a history of the file, its size as
it "grows" during writes, and there should be some record of when the
file is done and flushed.
The USN Journal offers a service, where each entry of that style,
is "sent" to applications that register for the broadcast service.
For example, Windows Search Indexer registers for all the NTFS USN Journals,
and people who have installed third-party "Everything.exe" or
"File Locator Pro" (Mythic Software), those applications also keep their
file lists current (additions, deletions, moves, copies) bu listening for
the broadcasts and applying their filter(s) so they can ignore any exclusion
zones.
The Search Indexer has two options (filename, content) indexing
or just (filename) indexing. We're not sure whether the ticky box for
"filename only" indexing has ever worked. If all the Search Indexer did
was filename indexing, it would finish a lot faster than if indexing
Content. Whether the box is ticked or cleared, the database contains
a content index. Typical database size is 4GB.
You can define Exclusions, to keep the Gatherer out of certain folders.
For example, WinSxS would be a poor choice of areas to index,
similarly indexing the OS "LCU" Last Cumulative Update folder on
Windows 10, that would be a piss poor choice of places to Index.
There can be 200,000 files nobody cares about in LCU.
This is a power user feature, that requires an investment in tuning
to reap a result. It took me *forever* to tune Windows 7, but for
some reason today, the Windows 7 search is pretty well instant. I
don't even understand how that is possible, because I was driving
the search with a script for a while (as part of testing and to
get rid of File Explorer bloat from ruining the result), and at
one time, it could never return a result in under three seconds.
Now, without patches or updates, it beats its old record.
1) There is a lot of mystery meat in Federated Search.
2) Federated Search recommended-max file count is 1,000,000 files.
Failure to observe this, it just means the Merge operations
the Indexer does, get slower and slower. Inverted Search indexers,
tend to index a set of files, and then they Merge the smaller index
into the Master index. And this is a miserably slow way to do it,
but more than one company does it this way.
3) Third party tools are willing to do filename-only indexing, which
can be a lot faster than (filename,content) indexing. I can't speak
for others, on the perceived performance of the third party ones.
I've tested Indexing, but I'm not making a fetish of this, and I needed
it to work on the Windows 7 Archive setup, as that's my NAS. I defined
some exclusions. There are still a few things I should be excluding
which haven't been added.
For my Daily Driver, I use Agent Ransack brute force searcher.
Search time is at least consistent, and there is a tendency to
not miss files when I use Agent Ransack. For the Federated Search,
there is some quirky behavior when entering names. For example
filename:"*test*"
will give you a more precise result than
test
entered without proper syntax. You can also do things
like that without the double quotes, but there might
be some exposure by doing so. I'm pretty sure some formulation
of a file name, will run afoul of this one, and the file won't
be picked up.
filename:*test*
You can name things and AND them together.
filename:*test* ext:txt content:"Hello World"
So one of the things it would be handy to find, would be
the web page with the "search language" that works this week.
You would think a piece of crap this complicated, would
have a Help file... Ha!
Paul (sent from alternate OS, experiment...)
Back to comp.sys.mac.advocacy | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread
It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-09 16:30 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Hank Rogers <Hank@nospam.invalid> - 2025-08-09 18:55 -0500
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-09 17:08 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Hank Rogers <invalid@nospam.com> - 2025-08-10 03:22 +0000
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-09 23:52 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing "David B." <BD@hotmail.co.uk> - 2025-08-10 09:54 +0100
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-09 23:28 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing "Mr. Man-wai Chang" <toylet.toylet@gmail.com> - 2025-08-10 12:34 +0800
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-10 11:25 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-10 12:37 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-10 19:46 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-10 17:00 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-11 00:04 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-08-11 06:13 +0000
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Hank Rogers <invalid@nospam.com> - 2025-08-11 06:23 +0000
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-11 11:26 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-12 01:15 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-12 08:54 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-12 13:41 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-12 10:54 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-11 10:57 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-12 08:52 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing "Mr. Man-wai Chang" <toylet.toylet@gmail.com> - 2025-08-11 20:22 +0800
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-08-11 19:16 +0000
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-11 17:03 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing "Mr. Man-wai Chang" <toylet.toylet@gmail.com> - 2025-08-12 12:36 +0800
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing WolfFan <akwolffan@zoho.com> - 2025-08-10 18:33 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-11 02:12 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-11 11:25 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-11 18:02 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-11 17:01 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-12 01:24 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-12 08:49 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-08-12 17:10 +0000
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com> - 2025-08-12 08:55 -0700
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Tom Elam <thomas.e.elam@gmail.com> - 2025-08-17 16:03 -0400
Re: It is stunning when you see how badly Windows operates: indexing Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-17 18:15 -0400
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