Sitecore index rebuild "job ended unexpectedly"

Question

In our sitecore project (6.6.0 rev. 130404), we are facing an issue when trying to rebuild large indexes using sitecore control panel. There is an index which contains more than 650,000 items. Half-way through the index rebuilding operation, the process stops with the error "job ended unexpectedly" being displayed on the index-rebuild dialog box. When analyzing sitecore logs, we can't find any recorded exceptions related to this. Because we didn't know when the index rebuild really stopped, I searched all sitecore logs for the word "Exception" but couldn't find anything related to this.

We face the same issue with QuickSearch index (even larger index than our own) as well.

In logs, we see "Index rebuild job started" message but nothing related to that being ended or interrupted.

What can be the possible causes of this? and how can I find evidence using sitecore logs?

(ps. I have previously sought help for good indexing practices on this post, but haven't implemented the suggestions): Sitecore index rebuilding practices)

Answer 1

If you have permission to do so: Try to look into the EventLogs on the server you are hosting your solution on. Also, do you see logs like "Hosting Environment Initiated a Shutdown" or anything like this? There might be alot of reasons for Sitecore to be shutdown and showing this error. From my own experiences this can be:

• Application pool with memory restriction exceeding limits and causing a shutdown;
• Application pool rapid fail protection that shuts down the pool;
• Changes in the Website/Data folder; (data folder can best be placed outside the website folder);
• Application pool recycle times -> can be scheduled and cause application pool to recycle;

Those were just a few of the things I found to be the cause of recycles sometimes. You might best now check your eventlogs and from there try to shutdown the above stated causes.

EDIT: Ensure the data and indexes folders are outside of the web root and update the web.config to point to the data folder.

Hope this helps you a bit.