Normal search running slower than before?

Question

I seem to experience a slowing down in the speed of normal searches (not indexing) with all of the options being the same as before. Currently using Version 2022 - Build 3349

Some more details:

• I have been using the same pc since I bought filelocator and searching in the same (more or less) files, found in the same folder system (approximately 9000 word files with a few txt files and some 400 folders in total).
  I did change the OS from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 Professional at some point, and replaced the hdd with an ssd.

• There are some pdf and image files in the aforementioned folders but I exclude them from the search (NOT *.pdf NOT *.bmp NOT *.jpg NOT *.png in the file name)

• I use large expressions (usually the command is 4000 or 5000 characters long, including spaces, lots of OR, some NEAR operators, plus lots of wildcards * and ?.) Boolean expression type.

Usually, even bigger searches would take some 20 seconds before, now I am well over the one minute mark for the same, more or less searches.

Do you have any suggestions so as to increase my search speed? I feel this is something that changed in the last updates.
Could reverting to an older version improve the issue? Any information would be forthcoming

Answer 1

There are no obvious reasons why searches would be slower in recent updates so to investigate the issue please collect some concrete figures.

Step 1: Baseline search

Create a baseline search to test the time taken. Run the search 3 times to get an average.

Step 2: Out-of-the-box figures

To remove the impact of any configuration modifications, download and install the current portable version into a temporary folder:
https://www.mythicsoft.com/filelocatorpro/download/

Run the same search as in Step 1 and check that you have the same number of hits. Repeat the search 3 times to get an average.

Step 3: Comparison with an older version

Download and install the portable installer for version 8.5 into another temporary folder:
https://download.mythicsoft.com/flp/2951/filelocator_inx64_2951.exe

Run the same search as in Step 1 & 2 and check that you have the same number of hits. Repeat the search 3 times to get an average.

Compare the results

If the results are the same but the times are different then please contact Support for more help.

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Notes

To narrow down where any increase may be taking place try running the search on plain text files, this separates out the search engine work from the text conversion work. If you don't have a library of text files try switching caching on which will pull the text from the cache instead of using the text conversion routines.