[SOLVED] OS constantly running search indexing

[Archon of the Valley]

My system has been constantly running search indexing today and I'm not quite sure why. It's causing my C drive to reduce to a crawl. I suspect this drive may possibly be failing (though SMART is still all good) but according to the resource monitor, search indexing keeps causing an up-and-down activity on the drive which seems to be part of the reason things are running so slowly.

Right now, the System and SearchIndexer.exe processes are saying they're searching/indexing C:\ProgramData for whatever reason. I tried stopping and restarting the WSearch service but it didn't seem to do anything. Should I just shut this service off and see what happens?

I don't use the search feature too often but I do occasionally use it. I just want to try to squeeze out a little bit more life from this drive if I can (if it is even failing in the first place) as I'm not in the best place, financially, and I don't really want to deal with the hassle of buying a new drive AND trying to figure out how to get it set up the way I want it.

EDIT: I'll also add that I have the paging file system-managed on my C drive, whereas E doesn't have it enabled at all. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it or not.

 

[Grobe]

You can disable the index flag for the C drive, and also deactivate the indexing service.

Also, if the disk is soon full then the OS have to spend lot of resources to find space to the files to save, and thus it may generate a lot of seek activity.

 

[Archon of the Valley]

Hi, will this affect me in any major way? I do occasionally use the search feature but not consistently. I have about 190GB free and this is a 2TB drive, so maybe that's the problem after all?

 

[Archon of the Valley]

Update: after disabling indexing, it's a bit faster but I also noticed that pagefile.sys is taking a lot of disk activity. I have it set so that Windows manages my page file size and I have 16GB of RAM but this is kinda frustrating. Should I tweak any of the page file settings to see if it helps?

 

[Grobe]

I have it set so that Windows manages my page file size and I have 16GB of RAM

This is way to go to boost file fragmentation. Fixed size is a lot better in order to slowing down file fragmentation. A general rule is to use about 1,5 times the amount of RAM for page file - i.e. 24GB in your case.

 

[Archon of the Valley]

Hmm so I should set it manually instead of letting Windows manage it?

 

[Grobe]

Hmm so I should set it manually instead of letting Windows manage it?

constantly growing files does indeed have a negative impact on file system performance over time.

 

[SkyNetRising]

A general rule is to use about 1,5 times the amount of RAM for page file - i.e. 24GB in your case.

That was general rule back in the days, when PC–s had 1GB or 2GB of ram.
On modern systems with 16GB of ram, pagefile with 1.5x times ram is just ridiculous.

Set it to 2GB initial with auto-grow to 8GB max - on E: drive.
Set to 16MB initial/max on C: drive (this is necessary to be able to make crash dumps, if BSOD happens).

 

[Archon of the Valley]

Hmm I'll experiment with it a little and see what works best. Thanks for the answers, everyone!