How often should I schedule crawls for Local SharePoint Sites?

Question

I'm using SharePoint server 2019 and have been seeing the 500 server internal error on my SharePoint sites. Thus I would like to ensure that I start running crawls for my content sources. What is the recommended schedule for crawls and should I use incremental crawls or continuous?

Answer 1

Hi Tevon ,

The decision to use incremental crawls or continuous crawls depends on your specific needs and requirements.

Incremental crawls are used to update the index with changes made since the last crawl. This is useful when you have a large amount of content that changes frequently, but you don't want to perform a full crawl every time.

Parallel Incremental Crawl Not possible.

Incremental Crawl can be stopped or Paused in between the crawl process is running.

Please note that continuous crawl doesn’t fix any errors – therefore, we still need incremental crawl run on the content source (every 4 hours, by default) even if we use continuous crawl.

Continuous crawls, on the other hand, are used to keep the index up-to-date in real-time. This is useful when you have content that changes frequently and you need the search results to be as up-to-date as possible.

The default interval is every 15 minutes, but you can set continuous crawls to occur at shorter intervals by using Microsoft PowerShell.

Multiple continuous crawls can perform simultaneously.

Once the continuous crawl is enabled, you cannot stop or pause it, you can only disable the crawl.

Continuous crawls increase the load on the crawler and on crawl targets. Make sure that you plan and scale out accordingly for this increased consumption of resources.

For more details, please see:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/search/start-pause-resume-or-stop-a-crawl

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/search/best-practices-for-crawling

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/search/manage-continuous-crawls

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