Monitoring search indexing tasks

To view a list of all search indexing tasks that are waiting to be processed, open the Smart search application and select the Tasks tab. Indexing tasks keep smart search indexes up-to-date according to changes made to the website content.

The system automatically creates indexing tasks when:

  • A document or object covered by a search index is created, removed or has one of its fields modified
  • An administrator Rebuilds or Optimizes a search index

If you encounter problems with new content not being indexed correctly, you can use the list of indexing tasks to investigate the issue. The list displays the following information for each indexing task:

  • Task type - the action that the task will perform with the data of the search index (Update, Delete, Rebuild, Optimize, Process)
  • Object type - the type of object for which the task was created
  • Search field - the index field used to find the correct data item inside the search index (_id in most cases)
  • Task value - identifies the object related to the indexing task (through an ID or code name)
  • Related object - the name of the specific object related to the indexing task
  • Web farm server
  • Task created - the date and time when the system created the indexing task
  • Result - if an error occurs while processing the indexing task, you can view the error message details here

To clear the indexing queue or stop unnecessary indexing, Delete () individual tasks.

Dealing with task errors

If an indexing task results in an error, the system stops processing subsequent search tasks. Once you resolve the error or delete () the problematic task, you can run any remaining search tasks by clicking Process tasks above the list.

By default, the system executes indexing tasks immediately when they are created. The list of indexing tasks is usually empty unless there is a long-running rebuild task, or the application is generating a very large number of indexing tasks. You can disable automatic running of indexing tasks by adding the CMSProcessSearchTasksByScheduler key to the /configuration/appSettings section of your application’s web.config file:




<add key="CMSProcessSearchTasksByScheduler" value="true" />


With the key set to true, the system creates search indexing tasks, but does not run them. In this case, you need to regularly process the indexing tasks using the Execute search tasks scheduled task. You cannot manually Process tasks when the key is enabled.