Working with files is hard, took me an embarrassing amount of time find a good way of implementing it in my app. In the end thanks to sqlite, and laravel jobs I managed to put togheter something that feels instantaneous when searching. Now al files indexing is done in background using jobs and I search the files on a database table with all the power of sql like query so I can match partial names. also files are inserted as they're found so even the slow indexing I can still provide some results