Windows Search 4.0 Desktop Performance tips and considerations

Doing a lot of work with Windows Search I have learned how the tool works and I have worked with a lot of great folks at corporate to help put together some fantastic information on performance tips and considerations.  Also in this post I wanted to talk about some of the key improvements we have discovered with Windows Search, does a 84% faster query time get your attention?  Well read along!

Here are some general tips, and as you can see some of the improvements are only seen in Windows Vista:

• Initial index build requires time
  • Expect to index 20-40 items per second
  • WS4 rearranges the property store indices supporting fast query
• Incremental Indexing
  • File System is scanned on startup
  • Most changes handled through notifications
• Smart Indexer Back-off
  • Keyboard and mouse use
  • High CPU utilization
  • High I/O
  • Low Pri I/O (Vista only)
  • Power Mgmt (Vista only)

We have also improved the overall Stability of Windows Search, take a look below at some of the highlights:

• Critical Watson errors addressed
  • Fixed ~85% of reported Watson crashes in filterhost, protocolhost, indexer
• Index resiliency improved
  • Improved ability to recover on index corruption
  • Improved ability to recover from registry corruptions
  • Enabled additional trace logging

To help prove out the improvements in Windows Search the folks at corporate put the performance to the test, below is there testing environment and the results in the charts below: