How can I confirm that the Reindexing Process is working?

Question

I am running EE 1.14 and I am seeing more than a few errors in my products data that should be fixed upon reindexing. Since the errors persist, I am thinking that the reindex process is not working correctly. I tried running the indexer.php script from a command line and the whole process seems to run amazingly quick...essentially instantly. Each index reports that it has been reindexed in 00:00 and nothing changes.... Kind of a rambling question, but what I need is some way to confirm that the process is actually doing anything?

Answer 1

EE 1.13+ implemented always running cron, so the indexer would be triggered at any moment. Since this is the case the indexers in Enterprise keep a change log table(s) of data that needs to be updated by the indexers. Such could be called materialized views.

• http://www.eschrade.com/page/indexing-in-magento-or-the-wonderful-world-of-materialized-views/
• http://davidalger.com/development/magento/a-new-breed-of-cron-in-magento-ee-1-13-2/
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21321225/when-does-automatic-partial-reindexing-actually-run-in-magento-ee-1-13

You may be experiencing a caching issue, have you tried to disable caching completely or flushing to determine if the data that is missing or invalid appears?

BTW, when running php -f shell/indexer.php the partial indexing isn't used, as this will still run a complete indexing of all EAV tables regardless of their change status.

Anyhow, hope this helps!

Answer 2

So...upon solution, this seems to have veered off-topic. I think the answer for the original question is a quality answer and may be useful for others, so I won't delete the question.

One of the errors I was initially seeing was that certain products were not getting a URL redirect even though a "url_key" was specified for those products. Changing/updating the "url_key" did not create a URL redirect either, yet, at the same time, some products were behaving as expected.

It seems that the indexer/reindexing process was running correctly. The problems I was experiencing were due to irregularities in the Magento URL rewrite processes rather than the Indexing processes.

The "real" problem is more correctly addressed here: URL Rewrites in 1.14 (EE) Don't Seem to be Created or Acted Upon for All Products along with my solution.