Search Content Sources Stuck at "Completing"

Question

The status of my current crawls is at "completing" and has been apparently for days now (typical crawl duration is 2-4 min). I have both stopped and restarted the SharePoint Search Host Controller and SharePoint Server Search 16 services on both application servers with no luck. I am now at a point that I will need to reboot these app servers.
My questions are this ... 1. Can I just reboot the two application servers without performing a full reboot of the farm? 2. What is the impact for the end user (yes, we have load balancing) if I reboot one then upon completion of that one, reboot the other?

(We are on SharePoint 2016 On Prem)

Please advise.

Thank you

Answer 1

Rather than answering the question about reboot, i think i will answer for the above query.

If your content sources are stuck on completing while crawl you can do this .

First of all are are there multiple content sources that are stuck at completing or only a particular one ?

What you can do is to find out the current state of the crawl via powershell and terminate the crawls. There is a nice powershell listed on SharePoit diary.

http://www.sharepointdiary.com/2015/05/force-stop-sharepoint-search-crawl-using-powershell.html

Once you terminate the crawls , restart the Search service application and initiate the crawl again one by one , not simultaneously for both the content sources.

Let me know if this doesnt help.

Answer 2

You should be able to restart the search servers without any user impact (besides performance) -if- they are setup in a way that allows this. (2 Servers for each component, the restarts must happen in a way that at least one server for each component stays online the whole time).

Your wording would allow a "less strict" requirement, which would only need to keep an index component (One for each partition) and a query component online at the same time. (Crawl related components can be rebooted without a noticeable user impact).

An alternative is to just restart the SharePoint search service under services in the same manner. If it does not recover within a few minutes, I would merge the log files to see if there are any errors in them.

One thing you should not do is terminating the crawls. SharePoint will notice this and will escalate your next incremental crawl for that source to a full one, which could take a while depending on the size of your corpus.