Forum Discussion
Slow OneDrive Upload Speed
Its not Just SLOW Upload speeds that are a problem.
Agonizingly slow Simple Searches are just 'not fit for purpose' with OneDrive for Business
When I search for files using Windows File Explorer on Windows 10 it is agonizingly slow.
I have an i7 6 core computer and running Office 365 for Business. All My Documents files are within OneDrive for business… approx. 300 GB of them.
All these files are stored locally as well as on the internet. My files are stored locally on the fastest 1TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2 and should take less than 10 seconds for any search… and this is how searches used to work until I signed up for Office 365 for Business 2 months ago.
But I cannot restrict search using Windows File Explorer… to ONLY search my local files?
This is a simple everyday task that I do many times a day that used to take a maximum of a few seconds before signing up for Office 365 for Business.
Now a simple search can take over 5 minutes.
This is because if you use OneDrive for Business…. Any search you do has t access the internet… wait for the search to upload… queue up the search command on some server in the Cloud…. And wait…. And wait… and wait…
Before any Microsoft Support person replies to say they have tested this using a crummy test environment with a few GB in size (or likely less) please test this with using a normal business environment with at least 300 GB of files and hundreds of thousands of files and many thousands of folders… and also a reasonably slow internet connection.
If Office 365 for Business cannot do a “simple search task” and restrict the search to local files like this, is it really “Fit for Purpose” ?
I opened a ticket for “Office for Business” and the workaround I was told was to “close OneDrive”… and then do the search.
Is this a joke or is Microsoft even interested in providing proper real world business solutions?
Is there someone at the steering wheel of Microsoft interested in fixing these problems?
Strangely the solutions to fix the SLOW Search should be quite simple. Microsoft should simply include functionality within File Explorer to restrict the search to Local files instead of searching the files over the internet. And secondly allow Indexing on these local files.
Microsoft know about these major limitations for many many months… but do they provide the fixing functionality?
Amazed this has not been fixed,
Dave
- Never thought about search as I rarely use Windows content search - never seems to find the file I want. Even searching for file names using File Explorer doesn't bring back files you know are there. I usually resort to PowerShell and Get-ChildItem!
Just an update on my previous post:
I discovered that Indexing had not been running on my OneDrive for Business folders. I updated the Indexing to include these folders and the search now seems to be working as it should.
Possibly the problem is solved for searching now on my machine.
There still remains the problem where searching within Outlook sends the 'search' to the server for searching... even though all my emails are also stored in a local .ost file.
Best Wishes,
Dave
- Hey, thanks for hijacking the thread, dude. Looking for help with slow upload speed, and now you've made it about search. Start your own thread.
- Interesting. Please start your own thread. I need help with slow upload speeds, here.
DaveIrl Hey just a couple of observations about your tirade (And some tips to actually fix the issues):
- This isn't customer service, it's a support forum. So please, take a seat. The things you are ranting about have little to nothing to do with the issue in question (Aka the topic of this thread)
- It might be worth looking into your indexing settings and restricting indexed locations to the most mission critical areas, if search speeds are that crucial for you.
- Regarding "But I cannot restrict search using Windows File Explorer… to ONLY search my local files?", I'm reasonably confident that it's possible to do this quite easily. Try adjusting your Group Policy or restricting network access for SearchApp.exe if you haven't already.
- Regarding "Strangely the solutions to fix the SLOW Search should be quite simple. Microsoft should simply include functionality", have you done much research on the topic of search efficiency? It sounds like a trivially simple problem to address, but as it turns out it's incredibly complicated, and it's nothing short of a miracle that it's improved as much as it has since search indexing was added back in Windows 2000. Tom Scott has a brilliant video on YouTube that I'd recommend to anyone interested in learning more on the topic.
- A final word of advice, if I may... You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar! This is especially true on a website where volunteers are doing their best to help you.
~DJ
- I noticed that OneDrive tries to download all the files at the same time, but it slows down the download speed horribly. Consequently, it will download one larger file faster than the same file consisting of many objects.
