Synchronize search indexes

When you are running your website in a load balanced setup you must ensure that all of your web server nodes use the same search index files. This guarantees that when you work with content any of the nodes, the changes are reflected in the search index, and searching for that content returns the same results on any of the nodes.

You can keep your search indexes in sync using one of the following approaches:

• Use Azure Search or Elasticsearch services in your Sitefinity CMS project where the search indexes are stored in the cloud. This is the best approach when running in load balanced setup, since you are not dealing with any physical files on the web server nodes filesystem, but are storing the index files in the cloud instead. For more information, see Generate and store search indexes in the cloud.
• Change the search index files storage to a shared network folder. This option is useful in cases where you prefer to use the default (Lucene) search service, and you have less intensive content editing. For more information see Change the location of the Lucene search index files.
• Manually sync the changes in the files under the ~/App_Data/Sitefinity/Search folder between all of the nodes.