The Content Index powers Confluence's search functionality and is also used for a number of related functions such as building email threads in the mail archive, the Space Activity feature and lists of recently-updated content.

For reasons of efficiency, content is not immediately added to the index. New and modified Confluence content is first placed in a queue, and the queue is processed once every minute (by default).

To see information about your Confluence instance's content indexing, go to the 'Administration Console' and click 'Content Indexing' under the heading 'Administration' in the left-hand panel.

On this page:

Rebuilding the Content Index

The index is maintained automatically, but you may need to rebuild it manually under circumstances such as these:

  • Your searching and mail threading are malfunctioning.
  • After an upgrade. If a reindex is required after an upgrade, it will be noted in upgrade section of the release notes.

To rebuild the content index,

  1. Go to the 'Administration Console' and click 'Content Indexing' under the heading 'Administration' in the left-hand panel.
  2. Click 'Rebuild Search Index'.

Screenshot: Content Indexing

Slow Reindexing

Does the reindexing take a long time to complete? The length of time depends on the following factors:

  • Number of pages in your Confluence instance.
  • Number, type and size of attachments.
  • Amount of memory allocated to Confluence.

It may help to increase the heap memory allocation of Confluence by following the instructions in the JIRA documentation.

If you are running an older version of Confluence and find that the index rebuild is not progressing, you may need to shut down Confluence, and restart it with the following Java system property set: bucket.indexing.threads.fixed=1. This will cause the re-indexing to happen in a single thread and be much more stable (but slower).

Viewing the Index Browser

You can access the Lucene index browser used with Confluence, to see if the required documents have been added to the index.

To view the index browser,

  1. Open a browser window.
  2. Log in to Confluence.
  3. Type the following into the browser address bar: <Confluence location>/admin/indexbrowser.jsp.
    For example: 
    http://localhost:8080/admin/indexbrowser.jsp
  4. You will be asked "Which index would you like to browse?"
  5. Type in the path of your index directory. By default, this is located at <Confluence Home directory/index>.
    For example, c:\confluence\data\index.
  6. You should see a list of indexed file names.

Screenshot: Index Browser

More Hints and Tips

  • If you are still experiencing problems after performing the above rebuild, the next step might be to remove the index and rebuild it from scratch.
    (warning) The Space Activity feature uses the index to store data. If you remove the index file, the existing activity data will disappear.
  • A tip for the development community: If you have the Confluence source, you can look for references to the SmartListManager to find the screens and lists that rely on the content index.
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