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Umbraco Examine Rebuild Says "Done" – But It’s Not

If you’ve ever rebuilt the Examine Index in Umbraco and assumed everything went fine just because the logs said so, you might want to read this.

Umbraco
Published on: , by:
Piotr Bach picture
Piotr Bach
Wojciech Tengler picture
Wojciech Tengler

How to Reproduce

  1. Go to Umbraco Backoffice → Settings → Examine Management → Internal Index

  2. Click “Rebuild index”

Examine Rebuild index button in Umbraco 13

Then check the Log Viewer.

You’ll see the below messages:

- Rebuilding index '"InternalIndex"’
- Starting async background thread for rebuilding index "InternalIndex".
- Rebuilding index '"InternalIndex"' done.

This appears to be a clean and successful operation.

But on large projects, that last line is highly misleading.

The Problem

The “done” message is logged a couple of minutes after the background thread starts, not after the indexing is actually finished.

If your site has thousands of documents, the actual rebuild may take several hours more.

During that time:

  • Content items may not be visible in the Backoffice

  • The DocumentCount shown in the Index Info is incomplete

  • Searches using Examine return partial results

If your index rebuild finishes in under 5 minutes, you likely won’t notice.

However, in larger solutions, this can cause significant confusion and lead to false assumptions during deployments or QA.

Our code analysis has confirmed that projects with at least 10,000 content nodes are affected.

You can expect an entry in the Umbraco logs shortly after the indexer reaches this threshold.

Bonus Tip

You can compare the actual number of documents in your database using a simple T-SQL query.

Then compare it with what Examine shows in the Backoffice:

Settings → Examine Management → Internal Index → Index Info → DocumentCount

Mismatch? The rebuild isn’t done yet, despite what the logs say.

Examine Internal Index Document Count in Umbraco Backoffice

Examine Internal Index Document Count in Umbraco 13 Backoffice

Recommendations

Until this is improved in future versions of Umbraco:

  • Wait longer than the log suggests, especially on big projects

  • Cross-check DocumentCount in Examine vs DB

  • Consider building a custom progress indicator if indexing is critical to your workflow

We’ve observed this behavior in Umbraco 13 and suspect it may also exist in earlier versions.

If you're debugging missing content or flaky search results right after a rebuild or application starts, this might be the root cause.

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