Newsfeed aggregation - extend time range

Question

We got SharePoint 2016 on premise with May 2018 patch level. Our Newsfeed aggregation on the personal sites today is showing followed content of the last 7 days if you click "show more" on the bottom of the feed several times.

Two questions

1) I think it used to show 14 days back lately. We have had an IISRESET few days ago. How can I make SharePoint recrawl the content of the missing days?

2) How can I extend the days to be shown from expected 14 days to let's say 21 days? If there is only a cache size instead of a "days limit" - how can I extend the cache size if possible to make the Newsfeed store more information from the past?

Answer 1

The following information is from Microsoft SA Support

On the Newsfeed section of MySite we can see the posts added by colleagues and events on different entities we follow. Newsfeed functionality is supported by Distributed Cache service. The feeds are stored on distributed cache and displayed from it.

There are some settings on User Profile application related to feed cache:

FeedCacheTTLHours, FeedCacheLastModifiedTimeTtlDeltaHours, FeedCacheObjectCountLimit, FeedCacheRoomForGrowth.

FeedCacheTTLHours controls which is the oldest post displayed on Newsfeed. The value is in hours with a default of 168 (7 days).

$upa = Get-SPServiceApplication | where {$_.TypeName -Like "User Profile Service Application"}
$upa.FeedCacheTTLHours = 96
$upa.Update()

After we modify the value we need to unload the application domain that hosts the FeedCacheService.svc (on IIS check under "SharePoint Web Services" the site containing the UPA services). We can recycle the corresponding application pool or just execute an iisreset. We need to perform this on all servers that hosts UPA services (servers where "User Profile Service" service is started).

If we use a value greater than 168 the PowerShell command will execute and the setting will be validated but will not be effective. That is because the "time to live" value for feed cache is hard coded to 7 days. So the cached entries will expire after 7 days.