Search Indexer Service

Question

Does the Tridion Search Indexing Service push items into Solr immediately?

I'm asking because our client has noticed that item they know are there are not appearing in search results. When I checked, I could see these components where only created 2 or 3 days ago but did not appear to be in the search index.

I checked the QUEUE_MESSAGES table and can see an a couple of entries for each new item, one with ACTION_ID 1 and and one with ACTION_ID 2.

I'm running the re-index tool but I'm not sure why none of these items made it into the index. Is there away to see how "old" the Solr index is, so the last time it was updated?

UPDATE

Re-indexing and restarting the indexer service appeared to resolve this issue. The QUEUE_MESSAGES table now appears to clear of any for the search queue so I my set-up if I see the number of items in this table growing I treat that as an alert to maybe perform another re-index/indexer restart.

Answer 1

Not entirely sure, but it used to be that changes got added to a queue and the indexing service picked up the tasks from that queue to update the search collection.

If that process is still followed with the Solr search of 2013, then that means that changes are never directly available in your search results. On the other hand, it shouldn't take days either (we are more talking seconds, possibly minutes on a very busy system). What you describe seems to indicate a failure in the process or the indexing service being down I would say.