The content indexes power Confluence's search functionality. 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, Confluence does not immediately add content 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:

(warning) The information on this page does not apply to Confluence OnDemand.

Viewing the Content Index Summary

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

  1. Go to the Confluence 'Administration Console':

    • Choose Browse > Confluence Admin. The 'Administrator Access' login screen will be displayed.
    • Enter your password and click Confirm. You will be temporarily logged into a secure session to access the 'Administration Console'.
  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:

  • Your searching and mail threading are malfunctioning. (Rebuild the Search Index.)
  • The Did You Mean feature is malfunctioning. (Rebuild the Did You Mean Index.)
  • After an upgrade. If a content re-index is required after an upgrade, it will be noted in an upgrade subsection of the relevant Release Notes.

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,

  1. Go to the Confluence 'Administration Console':

    • Choose Browse > Confluence Admin. The 'Administrator Access' login screen will be displayed.
    • Enter your password and click Confirm. You will be temporarily logged into a secure session to access the 'Administration Console'.
  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:

  • 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

Confluence uses a search engine called Lucene. If you need to see more details of the indexed pages in your Confluence site, you can download and run Luke. Luke is a development and diagnostic tool that accesses existing Lucene indexes and allows you to display and modify their content in several ways.

Start Luke and use it to open the index directory, located in your Confluence Home directory. For example:
c:\confluence\data\confluence-home\index.

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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