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Sitecore CD servers triggering index update jobs?

The Problem

Recently, I was checking my CD server logs for an issue that was reported and stumbled across some log entries which mentioned about index update jobs getting triggered as in snapshot below-

This made me think that should these jobs actually get triggered from CDs??

The answer is NO! 

Why?? Because web indexes already get updated from CM servers during item publish events etc. (if the indexes are already maintained by the CM instance). Doing the same from CD servers is redundant and increasing unwanted load of index update jobs on CD servers. Also, CD servers are only supposed to READ from indexes and not WRITE to them (in most cases)

Then why are these jobs getting created?

I started looking into my index configurations on CD servers and from what I could see, all the web indexes in our case on the CD instances are configured with  "onPublishEndAsync", "remoteRebuild" or "rebuildAfterFullPublish" strategies.

As per Sitecore best practice, if the indexes are maintained by the CM instance, then there is no need of CD instances to update the indexes. This means we should configure the web indexes on the CD instances to use no strategy or "manual" strategy only.

My next question was how did we miss this? We found that we had it pretty much in control until Sitecore 8 when we used zSwitchMasterToWeb which automatically updated indexing strategy for our custom web indexes to manual strategy. While upgrading our application to Sitecore 10, this got missed/skipped.

Since Sitecore has introduced role based configurations from version 9 onwards, this can easily be managed in your index configurations directly now. If you have a myCustom_web_index configuration in your application, you should update the configuration from 

<index id="myCustom_web_index" type="Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider.SwitchOnRebuildSolrSearchIndex, Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider" patch:source="MyProject.Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.Index.Web.config">

        <param desc="name">$(id)</param>

        <param desc="core">$(id)</param>

        <param desc="rebuildcore">$(id)_sec</param>

        ...

        <strategies hint="list:AddStrategy">

                <strategy ref = "contentSearch/indexConfigurations/indexUpdateStrategies/onPublishEndAsync"/>

                <strategy ref="contentSearch/indexConfigurations/indexUpdateStrategies/remoteRebuild"/>

        </strategies> 

To: 

<index id="myCustom_web_index" type="Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider.SolrSearchIndex, Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider" patch:source="MyProject.Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.Index.Web.config">

        <param desc="name">$(id)</param>

        <param desc="core">$(id)</param>

        ... 

        <strategies hint="list:AddStrategy">

                <strategy ref="contentSearch/indexConfigurations/indexUpdateStrategies/manual"/> 

        </strategies>

Using the settings above allows that no index update is performed by the CD instances. 

Hope it helps you, thanks for reading!!

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