Deleting the Journal IDs on Nodes will cause Indexing to run on restart

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.

Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Summary

Problem

If you clear the Journal folder on restart in your Confluence Data Center instance, then the system will perform a full re-index on every restart. This is not desirable in large enterprise installations where the Content Indexing process may take many hours to complete.

Diagnosis

After every restart of a node, Confluence will immediately being reindexing content within the application. This is contrary to expectations, as the Data Center nodes should not be reindexing on restart unless the instance was performing a full rebuild of the indexes from scratch.

Cause

If the edge_index.id and main_index.id are deleted from the journal folder in the Confluence Home directory, then the two nodes will not share the same journal ID for the indexes. If the IDs do not match between the nodes, then the instance will begin a complete content reindex to restore the parity between the nodes.

Solution

Resolution

To resolve this issue, do not remove the contents of the journal directory in your instance.

Updated on April 8, 2025

Still need help?

The Atlassian Community is here for you.