Search indexing is taking a remarkably long time.

I wound up solving the problem on my own. First, I set it to only index "Offline Files", "Start Menu", and "Users" (as I have no need to it to index all of my music, documents, etc). That didn't help in and of itself (although it did give Windows a lot of less files to have to index). It was still extremely slow. Then, I turned my computer off and back on, and it suddenly started working very fast. It indexed over 7,800 files in mere minutes, and was finished.

I believe it was an issue related to an external hard drive I had plugged in at the time. I haven't had the problem since the events described in my second post. Indexing is fast now.

Thank you, though.

I have spent hours on the slow indexing issue and here are some of the things I did. Some may have helped, others not, but it's still slow. However the actual search function is working quite well so am leaving it now to crawl (probably indefinitely)

below are high level statements as to what I did. if you want to try these in some cases you will need to search internet to find out how.

One Drive - i gave up with it, moved all the onedrive folders back to hard disk which is a saga in itself
Filenames - i used move to zip folder to identify dodgy filenames and folder names in case they are an issue and fixed
CSC - client side cache, cleared it out (search www for this, needs reboot and registry update). I still see CSC turning up automatically in the windows search folders, have given up trying to remove it but at least I am fairly confident now it's not corrupted
FIle TYpes, i stripped out many tens of file types from the search. if I had the time i would take out all but about 40 but it's a click by click operation
Folders, i narrowed the folders to only the folders I really really need
Large files , i ensured no large files in the index list such as pst backups (even though search is only meant to index the properties )
Event 10023. (in Event Viewer for gatherer , see www to find details)This occurs regularly and it's this which slows up the indexing mostly I am sure. I haven't found a way to stop it. it's a reliable 8 minutes between each 10023 . It may be to do with firewall, i have Symantic and that has some interaction with Defender. I was not able to fix this anyway. Anyone succeeding please advise
Updated windows to latest
SCANpst on all outlook pst,ost files and fixed all
Set the backoff in regedit to force windows search to not stop whilst system in use
Tried increasing prioriuty for windows search when I can be bothered to set it
Tried looking at a log of updated files to work out what files causing the 10023 but not able to determine

so despite all this indexing is still slow. I see the Event 10023 as the root cause and searches on internet do not reveal a fix. There is no way I can find to isolate which files are causing the 10023 as windows search does not tell you what file it is indexing

I am having the exact same issue... slow indexing. This seemed to begin after a clean installation of Windows 10 a couple weeks ago. The full indexing that used to take a few hours now takes many days. No rogue processes or high-CPU usage are present.

I have also found Event ID 10023 (Search-related) occurring regularly, every 8 minutes or so, in the Event Viewer. The only online info I have found is that this Event is related to pdf Ifilter, which is not active on my system.

In any case I'd appreciate any advice. Do any other users find Event ID 10023 occurring in their logs?

Restarting the windows search service as suggested in the link from Dalchina does not correct the issue

AgoPMac10000 - it's comforting to see someone else with precisely the same symptom (Event 10023 every 8 minutes) . I really feel your pain .

I gave up trying to fix the Event and my system has now been indexing for over a week, creeping forward a few files per day. Searches hence only partially work.

I am not about to reinstall/repair windows 10 or/and office. I have a life and a job !. I hope someone who works for Microsoft reads this and provides a max 10 minutes solution.

so the latest Windows 10 update I received which was August 2019, has fixed the issue. Either MS knew about it and fixed it, or maybe the inherent refresh of some system files/settings has done the trick. I suggest make sure you are fully updated. It's so nice to see the term "Indexing Complete" , hope it works for others