Search in Explorer is slow

[batzen]

Windows Build Number

10.0.19043.0

Processor Architecture

AMD64

Memory

32GB

Storage Type, free / capacity

NVME SSD, 410 GB, 930 GB

Relevant apps installed

Windows 10

Traces collected via Feedback Hub

None.

Isssue description

Searching in Explorer is really slow.
Even searching in folder structures with relatively few files takes very long.

Steps to reproduce

For example:
Cloning the dotnet wpf repo and searching for "runtests.cmd" pegs one CPU core for 3 minutes and 27 seconds (then Explorer.exe crashes on my system).
The folder contains 4599 folders and 30142 files.

For comparison (on my machine):
Enumerating all files, without any caching/indexing, with .NET 5 takes about 40 milliseconds (i can share my code if you don't believe it).
So the time difference is at around a factor of 5,175 (((3 * 60) + 27) * 1000 / 40).
Even searching inside every file for the given text only takes around 1.5 seconds (while skipping binary files) and around 6.5 seconds when including binary files (in can also share my code for this task if you are interested).

That's so shockingly much wasted electricity/battery life.

Expected Behavior

Searching in Explorer, given that it even uses an index, should be instant instead of taking minutes.

Actual Behavior

Searching in Explorer takes minutes.

[AvriMSFT]

@batzen thanks for reporting your issue! I've reached out to the necessary folks who work on Search and Explorer here. I'll be sure to ping this thread with any updates.

[batzen]

Just leaving this here:

[Eli-Black-Work]

@batzen By the way, I recently upgraded my home computer to Windows 11, and it feels like the Windows Search feature in Windows 11 may have had some upgrades. Obviously it would be nice if searching in Windows 10 was performant, too, but I wonder if Microsoft will be mostly focusing on improving performance in Windows 11, going forward.

[AvriMSFT]

hey @batzen wanted to check back in on this thread here. Have you upgraded to Win11? If so, would love to hear about your experience with Search and File Explorer there. If not, are you still hitting this issue in Win 10? Thanks!

[batzen]

@AvriMSFT I am on Win11 (22000.556).
Performance of explorer search did improve, but it's still unacceptable slow and it didn't crash at the end of the search.

I searched for "spy*.exe" again.
It took 5 Minutes to find 1 of 2 matches, even though both matches are in the same folder, it took another 2 1/2 Minutes to find the second one.
So the total search time was 7 1/2 Minutes.
That's quite an improvement, compared to my last try, but it's still 150 times slower than my own tool.

My own tool, after some optimizations, only needs ~3 seconds to search through the whole "c:" partition.
I can't stress this enough:
My own tool does NOT use an index and does NOT do any caching. It just iterates over all files and directories in parallel.

[AvriMSFT]

Thanks @batzen! I've sent this off to the search team. They're aware of the issue and are investigating. Will report back with any updates as they come in 🙂.

[no-j]

Explorer search is STILL UNBEARABLE in Windows 10, unbelievably busted. I've been using 3rd party software only for searching files for a few years already, and every time that I make the mistake of trying to search something in File Explorer I immediately regret it. The fact that it is not fixed after YEARS this is happening is mind boggling for me... it's really like Microsoft have no respect for any of its customer's time, and in an era we have probably the fastest hard drives and memory in human history.

This is inexcusable, unprofessional, and makes me really, really sad.

[batzen]

@AvriMSFT Any news here?

[batzen]

@AvriMSFT Any news here? It's almost a year without.