This “silent” background process is ruining your PC gaming performance
When you get great components for your PC, you expect everything to work properly. Smooth images, fast loading times, it works. So when you’ve bought a great GPU and the game continues to stutter, it can be extremely frustrating, but the problem may be something less obvious.
Background Indexing is a Silent Killer
The root of your problem could be something called “background indexing,” which refers to any process that keeps metadata constantly in sync and searchable for files on your drives. Background indexing is used by a number of services, including OneDrive, Steam, and Windows Search. The tool keeps track of which files have been created, renamed, modified or deleted, so that the services that need to search for them can be quick and efficient.
This is because all files on your PC receive frequent changes and need to be constantly reindexed. These files can include things like game installation directories, which often contain tens of thousands of files. These files are frequently modified, especially during patch downloads, startup, and GPU updates. If indexing is enabled on the drive or folder where your games are located, multiple background indexing processes may be running at the same time, which can sometimes cause stuttering while gaming.
Such problems can usually occur if you modify your game files. Changing the default save locations, moving Library folders to another drive, and enabling certain features, such as OneDrive’s Backup Known Folders feature, can all cause the locations of your folders or destination drive to be indexed. If this happens, Windows Search will track changes to files in these directories, which can affect many game files and potentially cause stuttering.
This is especially the case in games that use modern engines, such as Unreal Engine 5, to dynamically stream things like map geometry and shaders during gameplay, as background indexing can heavily affect latency when accessing your PC’s disk. This may result in micro-stutters, longer loading times, or frame time spikes.
Slower drives, such as SATA HDDs or SSDs, may suffer even more from background indexing when running graphically demanding titles because they have a lower maximum queue depth as well as higher latency than faster drives. They often don’t have enough bandwidth to successfully juggle background processes, your game running, and any indexing going on. Even if the disk is partitioned to keep Windows elsewhere, slowdowns can still occur.
There are a lot of other things that can have an impact, like CPUs and the type of background processes you have running while gaming, but overall you can expect anything slower than an NVMe drive to potentially have issues juggling those workloads.
How to tell if background indexing is your problem
Troubleshooting is difficult at the best of times, but there are a few simple indicators to look for if you want to identify background indexing as the cause of your game’s stuttering. First, you’ll need to open your Task Manager (CTRL+ALT+DEL) and navigate to the “Processes” tab. In this list, look for the following processes:
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SteamService.exe or steam.exe
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SearchIndex34.exe, SearchFilterHost.exe, or SearchProtocolHost (Windows search index)
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MsMpEng.exe (Windows Defender Real-Time Protection)
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EpicWebHelper.exe (epic games launcher)
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OneDrive.exe
Whether you have a hard drive or an SSD, even tiny usage of tasks like these can increase latency and cause stuttering. If you notice any stuttering in your game, immediately open your task manager and check your disk usage. If any of the processes in the list above are using an unusual amount of disk space, they may be the cause of your stuttering.
If you can confirm that these processes are causing the problem, your best bet is to reduce the number of workloads that are simultaneously affecting your storage device. A good way to do this is to move your game library to a different drive than your operating system, if you can. This will separate your game’s read and write operations from problem-causing background processes, such as updates, virus scans, or search indexing.
If you can’t move your library to another drive, you can also disable indexing specifically for your game drive or folders. You can also consider completely upgrading your drive with an NVMe SSD, which is faster and more capable than most other options, and therefore will have no problem running games and other processes in the background at the same time.
If all else fails, you can also choose to pause, schedule, or temporarily suspend background services, such as virus scans or automatic updates, during periods when you are playing games. This will also prevent these background processes from overlapping with the things you really want your computer to focus on.
If you’re having issues with your games stuttering even if you have a good drive or decent GPU, background indexing processes could well be the cause, so make sure to watch out for these conflicts. That said, it’s still possible that your problem is completely different, so don’t focus too much on it: it’s just one of many forms of troubleshooting that can solve your problem.
