Hot Swappable Indexes with Sitecore 7

Recently I had a project that was heavily using somewhat complex computed fields to index a large amount of data. Because of this, rebuilding the entire index was taking a substantial time.

The problem was that our search pages for the site relied on these indexes to function. So anytime a full index was being kicked off, the search would basically be unavailable for the time it took the index to rebuild.

Thankfully, I found out that in Sitecore 7 there is a new feature that lets me avoid this problem. A configuration setting called SwitchOnRebuildLuceneIndex, that essentially rebuilds the index in a second directory. While the index is building, the site runs off the first directory as normal. When it's finished, it swaps over to using the second freshly updated index. No downtime in between.

This was really easy to setup to. Just go to the configuration file Sitecore.ContentSearch.Lucene.Index.Master.config (and don't forget to repeat this for the Web index, and any other instances you have), and replace the following line...

<index id="sitecore_master_index" type="Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider.LuceneIndex, Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider">

with...

<index id="sitecore_master_index" type="Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider.SwitchOnRebuildLuceneIndex, Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider">

That's it! Now, rebuild the index twice, and you should notice a new directory in your indexes folder.

I wish this was a default setting, it would have saved me a little headache.