拾贝者的小木屋

The site owner reported that search function failed to work on a list which was searchable in the past. It grew over more than 10,000 items recently and it has its own unique permission.

Reviewing the settings, the site's search visibility is on and the list's item level search is also on. But in the search database it was recorded that the entry point for the list has an error as below:

This item could not be crawled because the repository did not respond within the specified timeout period. Try to crawl the repository at a later time, or increase the timeout value on the Proxy and Timeout page in search administration. You might also want to crawl this repository during off-peak usage times.

Searching the Internet and MS Technet I found some clues related to the access permission. But some suggestion from　those postings didn't resolve the issue. So I tried some other tricks:

1. Moving the list to a new site with permission: working.
2. Rebuilding the list at the current location: not working.
3. Rebuilding the site at the current location: not working.

Then I run into an MS Field Engineer, Jim Matson who made a presentation of SharePoint trouble shooting on a conference. In his presentation Jim mentioned that a large SharePoint object with a heavy permission setting may cause some unexpected errors in many ways. I brought my case to Jim after his presentation. He gave me two suggestions:

1. Reset the list's permission back to the parent site;
2. Create a subsite or site collection with desirable permission, and then move the list there.

I tried the first suggestion with the site owner's consent, and then the crawl the list again. Bingo! the list items were all crawl-able again. The site owner is happy with that.