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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Monday, February 06, 2006

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Desktop Search

After many months of using Windows Desktop Search I un-installed it. Why? Well it started with my new little Fujitsu Lifebook P7120. I never installed Desktop Search on it cause I was afraid of the overhead. Plus it’s just so darn speedy I didn’t want to slow it down and I suspected that Desktop Search manifests itself via lots of “overhead”.

However, I didn’t want to lose out on fast search in Outlook. So I just installed LookOut. It’s still out there and works just great. See the problem with Desktop Search is that it puts its hooks everywhere (it hooks into the Explorer, bunch of system processes, Outlook, and so on… it even replaces the super slow but reliable built in XP search assistant that I use all the time to find things in a specific folder). All I want is to find my email quickly and till Outlook 12 ships with its new fast search, I’m stuck with Outlook 2003’s slow search. I keep my filesystem organized, and use programs such as SlickRun and AppRocket to open folders and launch applications so I don’t need the file system indexer as much.

Anyway, I un-installed WDS from my home desktop. My memory footprint went down about 100 MB. Since WDS runs in other OS processes in addition to having it’s own, it’s my opinion that this just slows things down and causes general instability (just watching it go in FileMon and RegMon will make your head spin). I realize that this is a broad generalized statement to make, but I just grew tired of suspecting it of causing my instability. I’ll wait for Vista before where I hope the Search issue gets solved better.

So for now, I’m back to what I was using over a year ago, and it’s much more lightweight which meets my needs. Nothing against the great folks that work on this product; I was on the dogfood train for a VERY long time helping to test the product. I look forward to using their technology in Vista.

Software
Posted Tuesday, February 07, 2006    Permalink    Comments [1]  View blog reactions

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Saturday, February 11, 2006 2:17:29 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
So you know you can turn most of our OS hooks off right?

The Search Companion integration can be turned off in it's entirety or you can click the classic search link at the bottom of our replacement pane to do a one off search using XP's Search Companion. They still do a lot of things we don't do (like look everywhere) so we wanted to make it easy to get the normal experience.

So for the record you'll get a dll or two loaded into Explorer.exe if you run the deskbar, as you'd expect. Another couple of dll's get loaded into Explorer.exe/IExplorer.exe for our results view when you do a search but these get queued for unloading when you close your results window. I say queued because COM delays the unloading of these dll's by 10 minutes for various reasons. A lightweight BHO gets installed into IExplorer.exe to watch for queries coming from msn.com. If you have the toolbar installed you'll get another BHO and a few dll's loaded into IExplorer.exe, as you'd expect. And finally if you have Outlook integration enabled you'll get a couple of dll's loaded into Outlook. I think that's it...

That may sound like a lot but it really isn't. If I remember correctly Explorer.exe runs with abou 94 dll's or so loaded at idle. Doing a desktop search query bumps this number to about 115 when it shows the results UI. Closing the window gets you back down to around 104 instantly and more importantly your Explorer's memory consumption should return to roughly what it was before you did the query. The other dll's will get unloaded by COM eventually unless Explorer.exe won't let go of them which can happen for a number a reasons.

What most people don't realize is that Explorer is loading & unloading dll's all of the time. Just open your My Documents folder, scroll through a bunch of files, and you'll end up loading several dll's from Office and everyplace else. These are all the various thumbnail generators (and their dependencies) installed on your system.

To be honest none of the hooks installed by WDS should really be that intrusive. The indexer is just about the only WDS component that does anything outside the scope of a query. And unfortunatly we have to crawl sometime... We work hard in between every release to improve our ability to just get out of the way when you'd expect us too.

Anyway, thanks for being a dogfooder as you don't know how much we learn from that. And hopefully we'll win you back someday. :)

-Steve
Steve Ickman
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