How often do you rebuild indexes from scratch?
Asked by Jason Whitener:

I end up rebuilding my confluence indexes from scratch about once every other month. @mentioning people stops working, or people start having trouble searching for things.

Does everyone experience this? Or might there be something wrong with our installation?


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: This is not uncommon.

In a perfect world, Atlassian applications do not need any manual indexing day-to-day. I've seen some that run without any manual index for several months, from one upgrade to the next.

But things do go wrong. Jira is complex and there's a load of index-related stuff that the code does not handle too well (primarily field changes). Sometimes we get glitches, or servers run slow and your user system goes squiffy during a sync, or they run into problems or even crash.

Once every 6-12 weeks is probably a good cadence, certainly a healthy one. More frequently than that, and I would start to worry about the general health of your system. Indexing more frequently, but prompted by a specific problems reported (like the mentions or searching) is also a good thing, but I would generally question why these are coming up more often than 6 weeks.


author: Colin Green
body: I have not tried to rebuild the index, I wonder about this, I am not sure if I cannot find pages since the search is bad or my index is corrupted.

have you seen that chatGPT confluence plugin, I have not tested it in production, wonder if anyone have used it

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

In Confluence, you only have the background indexing option - go ahead with that, the worst thing it does is make your Confluence a lot slower while it runs.  

I recommed clicking it just before going to bed, or at weekends - any time your people are unlikely to be running huge complex searches is fine, and the process is quicker than you expect (one of our clients has several millions of pages and an old server, still under 5 hours to re-index). Even if they do use it during re-indexing, the worst case is that they run a search and get nowt instead of a good answer.

As for ChatGPT, yes and no. I would love it to start answering all the questions that people don't understand what search engines are for. I really really want to tell 75% of community posters to RTFM. ChatGPT could work for that.  

But one of our community leads tried it. We had to remove every answer it gave for bring wrong. Horribly wrong. Adaptavist tried it too. Wrong, wrong, wrong, with hint of being horribly wrong.  


author: Gonchik Tsymzhitov
body: If my system is not reindexed as job. Does it mean is too bad?

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: No, it should be fine. A regular re-index shouldn't be necessary, I prefer to leave it to the admins to decide when one is needed and let them kick it off.


author: Gonchik Tsymzhitov
body: So it means the reindexing need to be done, only if it's really need ;)

General rule - just rebuild indexes weekly, annually it's incorrect.

I think that's why Atlassian does not recommend it in the documentation, only for crashes, bugs etc.


author: Jason Whitener
body: Thanks. I will just schedule regular index rebuilds rather than wait for users to report issues.

It is disappointing that this requires restarting confluence though. Hopefully future versions can handle this without restarts.

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Er, it's never required a restart. You go to Admin -\> Indexing, check the settings are right (I would not expect them to change), click re-index and forget it. No restart needed.


author: Jason Whitener
body: When that does not fix the issue, support always asks me to rebuild the indexes from scratch by shutting off confluence, deleting 'index' and 'journal', and starting confluence back up. Then clicking the re-index button in the admin ui.

More often than not, indexing through the admin ui is not enough for us.


author: Carla Ann Rowland
body: I concur with Nic... confluence never requires a restart. for me. There must be a setting impacting your scenario.


author: Carla Ann Rowland
body: Jira and Confluence need to be have a full re-index nightly so that it keeps issues and data correct let along users. This also helps any add-ins and search engines for Confluence.

Possible resources if you have not checked:

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/content-index-administration-148844.html#ContentIndexAdministration-Morehintsandtips>

performance tuning:

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/performance-tuning-130289.html>

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Just to be clear, this is absolutely not the case. Jira and Confluence index individual items whenever they are changed.

If you are finding you need to re-index more frequently than every month, you've got significant problems and you need to investigate and fix them.