What happens if I interrupt JIRA's locked re-indexing by restarting services?

[Tayyab Bashir]

Hi, 

I haven't ran into any problems regarding this yet, but I was just wondering what would happen if I interrupted JIRA's re-indexing by restarting the services or shutting services down? 

Indexing is related to issues, so even if it does get interrupted the issues would remain the same? So I can't seem to understand what might be the adverse consequenses? 

And another question related to this: 
How can one stop JIRA's locked re-indexing? Since there's no option to cancel re-indexing, could I stop it by restarting jira's services?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Short answer is that you will get a completely broken index, and you will need to re-index the system in full again.

A little more detail:

Imagine the process as "throw away the index, then read each issue from the database in turn and build an index record for it". 

If you shut the service down, it will finish the issue it is currently doing and stop.  You will end up with some issues indexed and others not.

If you kill it from the outside, you don't give it a chance to shut down cleanly, so you could get a corrupted index record as well as the partial index.  If you're using a HSQL or H2 database, this can (rarely) render your JIRA unusable (but you shouldn't be using them for production systems).  With real databases, the worst case is a few garbled index entries on top of the issues you've not indexed.