The Content Indexes power Confluence's search functionality and they are 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. The Gliffy Plugin also uses them for some of its functionality.

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).

On this page:

Viewing the Content Index Summary

To see information about your Confluence instance's content indexing,

  2. Click 'Content Indexing' under the heading 'Administration' in the left-hand panel.

Screenshot: Index summary

Rebuilding the Content Indexes

The content indexes are maintained automatically, but you may need to rebuild one or both of them manually under circumstances such as these:

In new Confluence installations, the 'Did You Mean' feature is not initially activated. To activate it, you first need to build its index by clicking its 'Build' button on this page.

To rebuild either of the content indexes,

  2. Click 'Content Indexing' under the heading 'Administration' in the left-hand panel.
  3. Click the 'Rebuild' button in either the 'Search Index' or 'Did You Mean Index' sections on this page, depending on the particular index you want to rebuild.
  • If one of these indexes has not yet been built, its button will indicate 'Build' (instead of 'Rebuild').
  • As shown in the image below, only one index can be (re)built at a time.

Screenshot: Content Indexing

Slow Reindexing

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

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

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