Applies to 3.0 and 4.0
What is the Indexing Service?
The Indexing Service is a Windows service that indexes files to improve search performance (see Wikipedia for detailed description).
Why does Microsoft CRM require Indexing Service?
Microsoft Dynamics CRM uses the indexing service to index the CRM help files. It is required to be installed and running on the CRM server, or on any clients running the Outlook client with offline access (formerly called "laptop client").
What's the problem?
In some cases, especially on the client, the indexing service can be a resource hog. I recently installed and configured the offline client on a brand new Windows XP laptop. Everything went ok; however, afterwards I noticed that system performance was extremely slow. After checking the task manager, I found that cisvc.exe (indexing service) was eating up 97% of CPU resources.
So what can be done about it?
There are several things that you can try if you experience this problem:
- Wait and see—wait a while to let the indexing service finish indexing the CRM help files. Reboot, and see if the problem persists. After the initial indexing of the CRM help files, the indexing service should use a very small amount of resources (unless another application is using the service and causing the problem).
- Uninstall the indexing service (under add/remove windows components) and reinstall it—in case the service is corrupted.
- Customize how often the Indexing Service is used on the workstation. Within Administrator Tools/ Computer Management, right-click the Indexing Service, navigate to All Tasks | Tune Performance, click the Customize radio button, click the Customize button, and adjust the slider(s) to the lowest setting. Then, reboot the workstation and monitor the performance of the Indexing Service.
- Since the indexing service is only used to index the CRM help files, you probably could disable the Indexing Service and your CRM client would probably work ok. However, this is not supported by Microsoft, so I would not recommend it.
In my case, the wait and see method worked for me. After the initial indexing was complete, the indexing service is now using <1% of cpu resources.
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