Search hangs, TOC fails to update after publish

[DaveMags]

Hi all - I'll try to make this make sense as best I can, hoping someone has some ideas:

We publish our Flare project in HTML5 to SharePoint, which we also use for our company Intranet. In the past few months, we've more and more seen an issue where, after we run a build & publish, the user site experiences a few major bugs:

• The search has the appearance of "hanging" for most search terms. The results page loads, but just has the spinning wheel.
• Search terms that do return results do not return relevant results. You can compare the local build (which always works) to the published site, or the site when it's working to the site when it's not working, and see the differences. (Interestingly, it returns the correct number of results, just not the right ones.)
• The Table of Contents doesn't display any changes, both removals or additions.

The content itself is publishing: if you know the direct URL of an item, you can load it directly. You can also search for it on our Intranet site, which is why we publish to SharePoint. You can also click on a TOC entry that should be removed and it won't load the topic, because the page for that removed topic is, indeed, gone.

This is somewhat intermittent. I'd say the site has these bugs about 75% of the time after a publish. I've started keeping a log to look for trends and variables. The only thing I've noticed is that we publish around the same time most days (around 5pm), and the site is working again around 1pm the next day - so about 20 hours later. I'm going to start running publishes at different times to see if this pattern holds.

I've worked with Madcap support. The only suggestion they had was to uncheck the option in the Destination to "Upload Only Changed Files." I had to stop troubleshooting with Madcap because they wanted us to upload our entire project, which for good reason our info security folks will not allow. Our internal IT has thus far been unable to resolve.

I don't know if this is actually a SharePoint problem or a Flare problem, but any advice or ideas would be welcome. If there are any other details of our setup or whatnot that would be useful that I didn't include, I'll be happy to share what I can. Thanks!

[CVigil]

I, too, recently started having the issue of search 'hanging' and not producing results. Were you ever able to find a solution?

[DaveMags]

No, we haven't figured it out yet. Still a problem. Our internal IT suspects it's a caching issue with SharePoint, and I think they are still looking down that path. We noticed, for example, that if you change the case of the URL (google.com to goOGle.com, for example) the site works properly. They think that URL difference signals the server to send the newest versions of the files, because it doesn't detect that as a previously loaded site. So they feel some SharePoint server caching setting might be the problem.

That's where we're at. Still waiting on a solution. It's been slow getting any progress with our IT.

[Michelle_Gardner]

Hello, @DaveMags. Any progress toward a solution? Search is hanging for us, too, when the help files are loaded to our Learning site.

[DaveMags]

Hi Michelle - Unfortunately no. It is still an issue and our internal IT hasn't really made it a priority to resolve. My last post about a caching issue in SharePoint is still our best guess.

Most of our users access the site through a link on our intranet, so our terrible workaround right now is, when we detect the problem, to update that link by tweaking the capitalization in the URL to one that does work.