Disabling Lucene indexes (programatically)

Over the past 18 months or so, my work has taken me around a great deal of integration jobs. As those of you who follow this blog will know, integration of external data into Sitecore is something that has often been explored (and still is).

Recently, while faced with the task of importing, cross-referencing, IDTable mapping – about 14.000 items on a regular (scheduled) basis, I began to look for even further ways of improving integration performance.

One thing I put my attention towards, was entries like these in the log files, while the import was running:

3796 10:34:59 INFO  'ImportCategories' Executing
ManagedPoolThread #2 10:35:13 INFO  Starting update of index for the database 'master' (7 pending).
ManagedPoolThread #2 10:35:13 INFO  Update of index for the database 'master' done.
ManagedPoolThread #5 10:35:13 INFO  Starting update of index for the database 'master' (8 pending).
ManagedPoolThread #5 10:35:13 INFO  Update of index for the database 'master' done.
ManagedPoolThread #4 10:35:13 INFO  Starting update of index for the database 'master' (9 pending).
ManagedPoolThread #4 10:35:14 INFO  Update of index for the database 'master' done.
ManagedPoolThread #4 10:35:14 INFO  Starting update of index for the database 'master' (10 pending).
ManagedPoolThread #4 10:35:14 INFO  Update of index for the database 'master' done.
ManagedPoolThread #4 10:35:14 INFO  Starting update of index for the database 'master' (1 pending).
ManagedPoolThread #4 10:35:14 INFO  Update of index for the database 'master' done.
ManagedPoolThread #4 10:35:14 INFO  Starting update of index for the database 'master' (1 pending).
ManagedPoolThread #4 10:35:14 INFO  Update of index for the database 'master' done.

So basically, as the items were being imported, the indexer ran along in the background desperately trying to catch up. Well maybe not desperately… ;-)

I started looking around for an official way to disable these indexes. The idea being, disable the indexes – run the integration – enable them again and let them catch up. Has to be more effective yea?  Kind of like harddisk trashing otherwise, for those of you who still remember that phenomenon ;-)

Alex Shyba came up on top of most searches I did, describing how to disable Lucene indexes. The post is minded towards how to improve performance in the production environments however, and not to mention it’s well over a year old by now. Sitecore has been doing a lot of work on the Lucene/Sitecore search API, and odds are that things may have changed in the year that passed.

Besides, I needed a way to do it programatically.

I started looking into ways of achieving this. Basically exploring APIs, configuration settings, even considering … patching-via-reflection into the Sitecore Patching Configuration API to comment out sections of Sitecore Configuration *grin*.  Fortunately, before exploring any of these options in great detail, I had the common sense to approach the excellent Sitecore Support team to get a better (and more importantly, supported) solution. And fortunately, as it turns out, there is one. Clean, and very very simple. Thanks guys :-)

Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.Indexing.Enabled = false;

Couldn’t be simpler :-)

And the configuration equivalent exists as well, even if it is not shown in the 6.3 default web.config.

<setting name="Indexing.Enabled" value="false" />