Fulltext index population taking a *long* time

  • Is there *any* way to determine how far a fulltext index rebuild has progressed? I have a table which has taken over 4 days to rebuild and I have no way to tell whether it's still working or simply *says* it's working. I can see three "FT CRAWL" processes for the database showing in sp_who2.

    FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY('catalog', 'PopulateStatus') is returning 1 (full population in progress) for the relevant table.

    Are there any monitoring views that report rows processed, rows left, etc. or anything else I can review to see what's happening? I haven't had any success in my searches so far.

    Thanks.

  • You can get some information from here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/system-dynamic-management-views/sys-dm-fts-index-population-transact-sql
    However, I'm not sure this will do more than give you an idea of how many more items need to be indexed with outstanding batches.

  • Your article led me to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/system-dynamic-management-views/sys-dm-fts-population-ranges-transact-sql.
    Do you know whether the "processed_row_count" value in this view is accurate? If so then it's only 26% complete and has 6 more days to go!

  • I don't. been a long time since I've used the DTS system at any scale, and haven't tracked the rows here. I'll try to set up a test and see if this is actually tracking rows.

  • Thanks. I've also been looking at the log files for this (SQLFT*.LOG) and notice in a previous rebuild that there were messages of the form:

    Error '0x80043630: The filter daemon process MSFTEFD timed out for an unknown reason. This may indicate a bug in a filter, wordbreaker, or protocol handler.' occurred during full-text index population for table or indexed view '[db].[schema].

    ' (table or indexed view ID '0', database ID '0'), full-text key value '0'. Attempt will be made to reindex it.

    A posted "fix" to this problem is "sp_fulltext_service 'restart_all_fdhosts'" but I'm concerned that this will cause the problematic rebuild to start over.

  • It might. The FTS engine got a lot of work in 2005/2008. Not a lot since.

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