It is recommended that you perform a re-index

[Diane Arsenault]

I have a group of users that want to make a lot of custom fields within their JIRA project. I started to make some changes they requested and got a banner atop of the project recommending that I re-index, which scared me. I have a lot of custom fields to enter into this project. What I don't know is if the re-indexing affects just my project or the entire database. I am a new admin. and I have put this question out there to the more experienced people within my group and no one has responded so I am putting this question out to the Atlassian answers forum for general information.

Thoughts?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Re-indexing affects the whole system. It basically deletes the index and rebuilds it from scratch, from the data in the database.

Best bet is to make all your changes and then re-index when they're all done, as running a one-off indexing operation is faster than doing it after every change.

The message is also misleading in my humble opinion - it appears far too frequently, often for changes that do NOT need a reindex. It's often overkill, but you'll only know when after you've been a Jira admin for a while...

[Diane Arsenault]

Thank you Nic, as a new admin. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw that banner. I am going to make all of the changes and then get on of the more experienced admins to give me a reindexing blessing.

[Norman Abramovitz]

Please be aware reindexing causes Jira to unavailable while the operation is active (ie do it off hours)

[Diane Arsenault]

Thanks Norman. In your operation are there only certain folks that do the reindexing? Just curious.

[Norman Abramovitz]

Not really. Administrators are warned and any restriction is left to the Administrator to defer the operation to another Administrator.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Our admins talk to each other before hitting re-index.

The length of time is proportional to the number of issues you have in your database.

If it's a few hundred, I wouldn't worry about the downtime. If it's tens of thousands, you'll cause significant downtime, so book it for out-of-hours