Fixing SharePoint Search Propagation Problems

See also Part II

I have been baby sitting my SharePoint search engine lately. I have some long term fixes I am planning to deploy, but in the mean time, things sometimes go bump!

The latest problems surround the engine sticking on "Computing ranking" and then today a propagation issue. The indexer eventually found itself unable to communicate with the query servers. This got ugly fast. Search results turned to garbage. They would cross scopes and return all kinds of erroneous stuff.

I was getting pannicky, all the while hoping I would not have to reset content. This I thought would very likely be a total fix, but drastic - the all new index would be pretty meaningless for quite a few hours. Resets of services and things were not going to fix this problem. Since the indexer seemed to have lost contact to the shares where the indexes were supposed to go, I decided to change the locations for the index files on the query servers.

In case you forgot, you do this in Operations > Services on Server > Office SharePoint Server Search Service Settings. For each of them, I put it in a brand new location. This didn't seem to help at all until they were all done. Then it all came back (fairly quickly). I still have a stuck on "Computing ranking" problem, but I have more reasonable content. I still intend to do that "Reset all crawled content," but I can do it in off hours.

See also Part II