full crawl keeps auto starts even though it is only scheduled for later

Question

I started a full crawl during the day because I created some managed metada columns and needed to have them showing on the search results. After experiencing really slow performance, I stopped it and decided to wait for the overnight full crawl.

For some reason after users started complaining about performance again, I went to the search service application and noted that a full was being run. This left me a bit perplexed, because after double checking, the full is only scheduled to run overnight. Is it possible that the search service application auto starts a full crawl if it is stopped manually?

Answer 1

A Full Crawl can be triggered from a few things.

• Stopping an incremental crawl
• restoring or adding databases
• crawl account is changed
• Change log does not contain URL's being crawled
• full crawl never completed

You have to complete a full crawl before any incremental can run again.