Indexing is taking too long

Issue

• Reindexing is taking or has taken too long to finish.

Environment

• Liferay DXP 7.0+

Resolution

• If reindexing is deemed slow or is still ongoing (the 2-arrow icon can be seen at the top right), it may have gotten stuck. This can be checked in the following ways:
  
  • Activate the DEBUG traces for the class com.liferay.portal.search.internal.SearchEngineInitializer and check the logs. If new traces appear after a while, the process is still ongoing.
  • Check the content of the tables BackgroundTask and Lock_ for finished or stuck tasks.
    • If any are found this article can be useful: Stuck reindex: How to check the progress of a reindex process and remove blocked BackgroundTask and Lock records
• Indexing can take longer than expected if the JVM's Garbage Collector process is taking up much of the memory. 
• Indexing can also take a long time if the amount of data to index is large. Consider the following configurations to reduce it:
  • The portal property dl.file.indexing.max.size controls how much of a document is indexed. A small value will lead to faster indexing but can result in missing hits when searching.
  • The portal property dl.file.indexing.ignore.extensions controls which file extensions are ignored when indexing. 
  • There's a system setting to ensure that only the latest versions of web content are indexed. To set it go to Control Panel > Configuration > System Settings > Web Content > VIRTUAL INSTANCE SCOPE > Web Content > Index All Article Versions Enabled.
    • This action requires reindexing the web contents (JournalArticle).

Additional Information

• Liferay DXP Searching & Indexing FAQ