Speed up network share indexing?

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Grismar
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu May 02, 2019 1:13 am

Speed up network share indexing?

Post by Grismar »

Hello,

I've been trying Everything and was impressed with its speed and ease of use for searching local drives and I like that the application supports a stored index for quick searching. This is a key feature, as I want to set up a situation where people use this index from multiple locations. (I'm aware that this is not a supported use case, but I've found helpful forum posts that I think will work in my case)

However, my main use case is searching a massive (20Tb, 100's of millions of files) network share. Other tools I've tried succeed in building a filename / date index within a few hours, but Everything was still stuck with a status message "Scanning..." after 24 hours of otherwise appearing inactive. The reason I'm still looking for the right tool is that those other tools don't include the full path in their index, while Everything does.

What can I do to speed up scanning of a network share? Or is this simply a use case that Everything won't be able to handle?

What I've done and tried so far:
- map a network drive instead of providing the UNC path (no apparent effect)
- unchecking 'Attemp to monitor changes'
- disable all other indexing, no NTFS indexing
- disable the exclude list
- lower the frequency for rescan to 'Never rescan' (to avoid restarting during rescan)

But to no avail...

Cheers,
JAAP.
void
Developer
Posts: 15096
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 11:31 pm

Re: Speed up network share indexing?

Post by void »

Everything uses FindFirstFile for folder indexing.
There is very little Everything does besides call this function.

You can check the indexing progress by enabling the verbose debug console:
  • In Everything, type in the following search and press ENTER:
    /debug
    Type in the following search and press ENTER:
    /verbose
Everything will show the current folder being indexed in Green, for example:
scan C:\Windows

To close the debug console:
  • In Everything, type in the following search and press ENTER:
    /debug
NotNull
Posts: 5167
Joined: Wed May 24, 2017 9:22 pm

Re: Speed up network share indexing?

Post by NotNull »

  • Make sure you are running the 64-bit version of Everything.
    Everything needs roughly 2GB RAM per 50 million files/folders. 32-bit Windows programs can only address 2GB RAM.
  • Does your system have enough RAM to keep the complete index in memory?
    Otherwise Everything will need to swap to disk (=slow)
  • Don't run Everything as administrator.
    With this account you probably don't have access to your server share.
    Enable Everything Service and disable Run as administrator. Both can be found under Menu:Tools > Options > General.
  • Try it with one folder first, instead of the complete share to see if you can 'contact' the share at all.
    (i.e. "\\Server\share\Some Folder" instead of "\\Server\share" resp. "Z:\Some Folder" vs. Z:\ )
Succes ermee! :)
NotNull
Posts: 5167
Joined: Wed May 24, 2017 9:22 pm

Re: Speed up network share indexing?

Post by NotNull »

@Grismar: is your issue resolved?

(I'm a little curious about performance with thàt many files. You might even have the "high score" :))
anotherusername
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon May 02, 2016 2:40 pm

Re: Speed up network share indexing?

Post by anotherusername »

So there's nothing else that can be done to speed this up? It can't be done in the background somehow and allow Everything to continue running normally?
NotNull
Posts: 5167
Joined: Wed May 24, 2017 9:22 pm

Re: Speed up network share indexing?

Post by NotNull »

anotherusername wrote: Fri Mar 20, 2020 7:13 pm So there's nothing else that can be done to speed this up? It can't be done in the background somehow and allow Everything to continue running normally?
That is on the to do list.
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