Confluence has an indexing mechanism used for search and various other functions. Index keeps on updating itself whenever there has been any change of content or new content has been added. Index queue can be seen via General Configuration > Index Queue. This page explains what are some of the causes of index queue getting large or taking a long time to finish.

Index Queue

Index of Confluence is a living breathing function in Confluence and it updates itself with any content activity in Confluence like adding or editing pages, likes or comments, page move or reorder actions. For instance, with changes being done to multiple pages we can see the following queue of index.

How long will it take to finish?

In case of massive changes in Confluence like a Space import, user synchronisation or page tree move the index queue can become significantly large. The time it will take to go through the queue depends on a variety of factors including disk speed of Confluence server and performance of database. To have a rough estimate of how far the queue is and it's progress, we can compare the following two values.

1. The value of index from DB 

   SELECT MAX(entry_id) FROM journalentry WHERE journal_name = 'main_index';

2. The value of index from the disk 

   <confluence-home>/journal/main_index

The larger the difference between the above two values the longer it will take for the queue to finish. But as long as the difference between the two is decreasing, the queue is being processed and eventually index will be updated completely.

Indexing stuck

There can be some cases in which the index queue keeps on continuously increasing and the gap between main_index from DB and the disk never closes. These are symptoms of a problematic indexing process. Follow this guide of Confluence reindexing becomes stuck to diagnose this further.