> But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.
Even when you turn the search indexer off, the indexer background service still seems to be doing ... stuff.
I have a Windows 10 VM I use for some testing and such, and all these background things keep using up huge mount of resources, no matter what knobs I turn and regedit levers I pull I just can't get it to stop.
For comparison, I also have a macOS VM which certainly isn't fast, but nothing like the Windows one. And the BSD and illumos VMs work basically fine (although in fairness they also don't start X11; but I do just ssh in to all of these machines and never use the GUI for anything).
But if you turn it off, you don't get the start menu indexed anymore. I don't need my files indexed, I just want my start menu shortcuts indexed. There's a few other small things that no longer work without indexing, though I forget what they are now. Everything is great, but there's actually other services that depend on search being enabled, as it tells you when you try to stop the service that is shutting down dependent service first.
Turn it off then?