Performance Metrics and Time Estimates

Last updated: 2026-10-01

Review performance metrics and time estimates for Content Search jobs to plan your search and replace operations effectively.

How long will Content Search take to complete? For example, how long does it take to process a 15 GB SharePoint Site Collection?

Performance Metrics

Here are recorded benchmarks:

These benchmarks were recorded using SharePoint Online.

Content search means opening and scanning each file's contents for matching text. This step is optional — you can restrict searches to metadata (file/item properties) for significantly faster runs.

Factors Affecting Performance

• Number of items, files, and pages to process.

• Average file size and document format (Word, Excel, PDF, etc.).

• Number of machines running the tool simultaneously.

• Whether file contents are scanned (adds 10–40% more time versus metadata-only searches).

• Complexity of the search pattern (wildcard and regex evaluations are slower than plain text).

Test Environment

• Single machine — Hyper-V Windows 11, 16 GB RAM, Intel Quad-Core CPU

• SharePoint Essentials Toolkit Enterprise Suite 2025 Release

• Microsoft SharePoint Online

Example Test Results

• 20 Site Collections

• ~18 GB of data

• 251 SharePoint Lists & Libraries

• 34,000 items/files/pages processed

• Completed in ~380 minutes (6.3 hours) with content search enabled

• Without content search (metadata only), expect ~10 to 15GB/hour or ~13,000 to 15,000 documents/hour (v11.5.0.1 or above)

Recommendations for Large Jobs

• Start with a small, low-visibility production site. Copy it to a non-production environment for testing.

• Get familiar with Search & Replace behavior — all replacement rules are matched against each match in sequence from top to bottom. Multiple rules can apply to the same file.

• Keep a recent backup before running Search & Replace. A PowerShell restore script is included with the download.

• Break large jobs into batches (e.g., 500 subsites per batch).