If the site is so large and on such a slow server that is takes several days then no amount of optimisation will really help you.

Time to bite the bullet and change to a better server. Problem solved permanently in hours saving you $$$ in time

That's how much I love these smart guys who, in response to a specific question, begin to lecture in the style of an old grandmother... Here's a type of youth today went... ))))
The server at my house is behind the TV. And he is weak, because I need it so much - he eats electricity less.
And the situation when a large site, even on a fast server, is indexed for many hours is typical. And the situation when indexing did not end at once is also common.

There is only so much juice that you can get from a lemon before you need to get another lemon

@rigin Can you append in title "[4] "? New features go in Joomla4 so its easier to find in issue-view which version they belong. Thanks.

@Hackwar Is there anything we could do about this?

@rigin is this indeed an issue you notice on Joomla 4? I improved the indexing process quite a bit in 4.0 and it does index a lot faster. Could you provide a bit more information about your site in order to determine if the indexing time is to be expected or not?

Generally, it is not exactly trivial to determine which parts haven't been indexed and which ones would need updating. However, checking if an item needs to be reindexed should be a rather quick operation, because it takes the result object that is prepared prior to indexing and creates a checksum over that. It then compares that checksum to the one in the database and only indexes that content when it has changed. If after restarting the indexing of that part still takes a long time, then you might want to look into your plugins to see which ones are executed during indexing (mainly to process the content triggers) and take up a lot of time.

In order to disable indexing on saving, you should just be able to disable the smart search content plugin. It should then still be possible to index via the CLI script.

I'm really torn on investing more work into this in 3.x, since all changes of 4.0 can't be backported due to backwards compatibility reasons. At the same time, it is more than just a bugfix and thus would have to go into a minor release... I would defer to @HLeithner if we want to do some improvements to speed this up in 3.x.

Generally, there are options to improve indexing speed specific to your site and there would also be the possibility of using a plugin which I wrote, which backports the changes from 4.0 to 3.9. If you want to go that route, please contact me privately and I'll try to help you. Please just search for my name and you will find ways to contact me.

I ran into this problem on Joomla 3.9. But I understand that this has always been the case in com_finder. ))
It's just that I got it on a combination of a slow server and a large amount of indexing.
@sandramay0905 advised to add the tag [4.0] in order to draw attention to the problem.

This problem occurred when indexing the site https://rigin.net/ . There are approximately 1,500 articles in it. Hardware-wise, it is located on a weak gigabyte ga-d525tud office computer.

I use the standard joomla 3.9 cron script for indexing.

On the provider's server, the indexing process took about 12 hours, and on this configuration it takes about 2 weeks.

When you try to edit the material in parallel with indexing, indexing is interrupted and when you restart the cron script, indexing can continue from the interrupted place, but if the session is interrupted, indexing starts again in the order of increasing the article id.

This can be seen in the admin panel /administrator/index. php?option=com_finder&view=index

So I'm running the improved code on a website with ~7500 items, about 3500 of those are articles. Indexing that takes about 30 minutes on a good server. Your site should index in definitely less than a day.

However, this is NOT a 4.0 problem.

OK, I'll fix it now.

However, this is NOT a 4.0 problem.

Sorry @rigin i thought its a feature request.

This is my terrible English.. )))

If needed we can backport improvements later (maybe after j4 release) but at this point in time I would really like to bring j4 into a release able state.

#33720 should improve indexing a little bit.

Closing as there is PR