Before you start 0a. You need a Moodle site with search configured and working via an Apache Solr instance. 0b. If your test site has cron running, then temporarily turn off the scheduled task that runs forum indexing (in this test script we'll run it manually, so it will be confusing if it runs automatically on your site). 0c. You will need a large amount of content to index, for example forum posts. If your test site doesn't have much content, you can add 100,000 forum posts as follows: Apply the attached xs_big_forums.patch Go to site administration / development / make test course Select the 'XS' size and enter a suitable short name and full name With the patch applied, this will create a course with 100,000 forum posts. It takes a few minutes. After you have created the course, remember to remove the patched change e.g. by using 'git checkout admin/tool/generator'. 0d. If you already had a large amount of content, you need to ensure it wasn't already all indexed - you can do this by going to the search areas page and clicking 'Delete index' next to the areas that hold a lot of content. Extra fun bonus I haven't put it in the test instructions but it can sometimes be interesting to look at the Solr admin page after an indexing run completes (to see if the 'number of documents' it reports is increasing roughly as expected). Testing the scheduled task 1. Go to site administration / plugins / search / manage global search. 2. Set the 'Indexing time limit' option to 10 seconds and save changes. 3. Go to site administration / server / scheduled tasks. 4. Click 'Run now' against the 'Global search indexing' task, and click to confirm. EXPECTED: Search indexing output should display, listing all processed areas. It should complete in approximately 10 seconds (probably takes a few extra seconds of overhead, e.g. 14 seconds). The large area (usually 'Forum - posts') will show that it processed a certain number of documents, ending in the message '(not complete)'. Immediately after this, the message 'Stopping indexing due to time limit' will appear. There may be other search areas (that would normally be done after forum posts) which were not processed this time. 5. Run the task again (you can just reload the page). EXPECTED: Results should be similar to previous. The large area or areas (usually 'Forum - posts') should now appear last after all other search areas. 6. Go to site administration / plugins / search / search areas. 7. Look at the large area (Forum - posts). EXPECTED: It should show the usual information, ending in '(not yet fully indexed)'. 8. Go to site administration / advanced features and turn off the 'Enable global search' option, then save changes. 9. Re-run the scheduled task. EXPECTED: The task should do nothing because search is disabled. 10. Go to site administration / plugins / search / manage global search. 11. Turn on the 'Index when disabled' option and save changes. 12. Re-run the scheduled task. EXPECTED: The task should now run indexing, with results similar to those from step 5. 13. Based on the number of documents indexed each time the task runs, estimate how long it will need to run in order to index all the remaining content (from the original 100,000 forum posts, if you did it that way). For example, if it indexes 2,000 documents in each 10 second run, it will probably need in total 500 seconds to do all of them. 14. On the global search page, set the time limit to about 1/3 of this time. 15. Run the search task repeatedly. EXPECTED: The task should run for (approximately) the new longer time. After about 3 runs it will finish indexing the large search area, and there will no longer be a '(not complete)' message next to that line. If you then run it again it will complete very quickly as there is nothing to index. 16. You probably want to enable global search again. Testing the CLI indexer 17. On the command line, in the Moodle root directory, run the following: php search/cli/indexer.php --timelimit=60 EXPECTED: Result should be headed 'Running index of site (max 60 seconds)' As all the content is already indexed, it should show 'No new documents to index' in each area. 18. In the web interface, go to site administration / plugins / search / search areas. 19. Click 'Delete index' next to the search area with large content. 20. Back on the command line, run the command: php search/cli/indexer.php --timelimit=10 EXPECTED: The search area should be partially indexed, with a message like this: Processing area: Forum - posts   Processed 3238 records containing 3238 documents, in 9.734 seconds (not complete). Stopping indexing due to time limit. 21. Run the command again; the same thing should happen. 22. Now run without the parameter: php search/cli/indexer.php EXPECTED: The heading should be 'Running full index of site'. It should take much longer because it will now do the full index. The message for the search area should not have the '(not complete)' text.