Neowin.net

Weird..mine is only using almost 8 megs. Is it indexing right now?

you're not counting the 4 different processes that the search engine uses... got to add them all up...

It happens on my work machine also. What's the size of your index? Mine's at around 212,000 at the moment. I'm trying to figure out if it's the large index causing the problem.

No idea about WDS_SL. If you see an "End task" dialog on shutdown for the indexer, the indexer is NOT hung. But Windows thinks it is because it takes more than 5 seconds to shutdown. We've done a lot of work to improve that in the Corp release (make it shutdown faster) and are continuing to work on addressing this issue. But it still shows up even in the Corp release on some systems depending on the state of the indexer (and its size and such). It's very important to us to fix this.

That said, if you don't click the "end task" button the indexer should shutdown normally after a couple of seconds and the message should go away. You can also close WDS manually before shutting down your system to avoid the message.

threedaysdwn, you're right about it not actually being hung. My work machine behaves like you said - the "End Task" dialog box comes up for two or three WDS-related services when shutting down or restarting, but they do go away shortly after. I should have been more clear in my post.

I haven't noticed if the new corp version behaves the same way yet, as I haven't restarted since upgrading to it a week or so ago. I'll have to see next time I reboot.

Also, I was wondering if you'd had any reports of the following:

Occasionally, when searching on an email address using the search box on the task bar, WDS will suddenly grab a huge amount of memory (usually 700MB-1GB) when it displays the search results page. When I close the results page, the memory usage drops again. If I try again on the same query, it usually displays without the memory bug. It seems to only happen if I'm quick with pasting the email address in then hitting "Desktop". If you haven't come across this bug yet, where would I go to report it?

Interesting. I can't seem to repro that on my system. You're saying it happens when you paste an e-mail address into the Deskbar? Does it happen when you paste or when you hit "enter" after pasting it? What program are you copying from?

It's usually copied from Outlook 2003. I copy it, paste it into the deskbar then immediately press enter. I'm not actually sure at what stage it happens (ie, before or after I hit enter), but I'll take notice next time it happens. Usually it's half-way through loading the search results window when Windows complains about lack of virtual memory and I notice task manager is showing 1.7gb RAM usage (I only have 768mb). It only happens sometimes and seems to be random, which is annoying when trying to reproduce of course.

I was guessing it had something to do with the size of the index. As mentioned above, it sits just above 112k items, about 200k of which are emails. It's like it loads it's entire uncompressed index into memory when it goes to search. Thankfully it's just a matter of closing the window and repeating the search to free it up, so it's not a big deal, but it's obviously not supposed to do that.

I'm interested to hear if it occurs on the 2.6 (corp) release. There are a lot of bug fixes in that release, so it could very well have been taken care of.

But if it does happen again, please PM me.

Thanks threedaysdwn. I'll let you know.

This is fixed in our Corp release and will be fixed in the consumer refresh when that happens (no date determined yet).

Thanks for the link sir!

Have you tried WDS? I'm genuinely interested in why you'd prefer their product. That is, anything other than "because it's Google" I don't really think they have any advantages over us (whereas Copernic and X1 each have their unique features that could appeal to different users).

MSN Desktop Search was what MSN called the beta version of WDS that the MSN Toolbar shipped over a year ago.

When it was released back in April/May, the name was updated to reflect the fact that MSN was shipping a component of Windows as part of their bundle.

So to keep it simple, "MSN Desktop Search" is just and old version of Windows Desktop Search.