Confluence Stops Indexing New Content after Several Days

Veracode

We are running Confluence 5.5.2, and it appears that Confluence stops indexing new content after a few days.

1. Indexing had stopped.
2. We ran a manual "rebuild" (by clicking the "Rebuild" button), and then indexing appeared to be working.
3. Three days later it stopped.
4. We ran another manual "rebuild" and then indexing appeared to be working again.
5. Three days later it stopped again.
6. Now, instead of running a "rebuild" we are clicking on the "Flush Queue" link periodically.

 

There are a few errors that I see only on the days when the automatic indexing stopped running.

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:DD,123 WARN [http-bio-NNNN-exec-NNNNN] [com.benryan.conversion.PPTSlideServlet] doGet Conversion task timed out for attachment : FILENAME.pdf with page number 0, waited : 300, now executing in background.

These entries (on those days) are the only rows displayed when I search the logs for lines containing the two strings "PPT" and "pdf".  That makes me think that it might be related to this question: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/180082

 

There are also errors related to Excel files that I see during the manual "rebuild" as well as on the days when I believe the automatic indexing stopped running.  I don't know if these are relevant.

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS,123 ERROR [http-bio-NNNN-exec-NNNNN] [officeconnector.index.excel.ExcelXMLTextExtractor] endDocument expected [ 3560 ] entries but read [ 3563 ]

 

Note: I checked these questions, and I do not think they apply.

• https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/137105
  • This is for confluence 4.1.4.  We are running 5.5.2
• https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/217583
  • This is regarding a problem with PDF files.  We do not appear to have that problem, but I could be mistaken about that.

 

-Vik Solem

Rodrigo Girardi Adami

Hi Veracode,

There are multiple causes for indexing malfunctioning as you stated. There's one that causes most issues: Performance.

By performance I mean JVM not working as expected (low memory, GC running a lot) and database connections (Number of allocated connections (pool), networking). These are the most common causes of indexing not working as expected.

So I suggest to review the memory size of confluence and make sure you are running with 1 or 2 GB more than the actual usage (set XMX and XMS the same size to avoid running into GC issue) and for the database, I recommend checking the database connection pool with some external thread dumps at peak usage time and update the connection pool accordingly.

I hope that helps

Cheers,

Rodrigo