Incremental crawl in MOSS corrupts the search result

Question

I'm having problems with a MOSS setup that after an incremental crawl, the search results will get corrupted. Troubleshooting it further using the search web service, the resulting XML looks like this:

 <ResponsePacket xmlns="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response">
  <Response domain="QDomain">
  <Range>
    <StartAt>1</StartAt> 
    <Count>20</Count> 
    <TotalAvailable>34</TotalAvailable> 
    <Results>
      <Document xmlns="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document">
        <Action>
          <LinkUrl /> 
        </Action>
        <Properties xmlns="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document.Document">
          <Property>
            <Name>RANK</Name> 
            <Type>Int64</Type> 
            <Value>1000</Value> 
          </Property>
        </Properties>
      </Document>
      <Document xmlns="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document">
        <Action>
          <LinkUrl /> 
        </Action>
        <Properties xmlns="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document.Document">
          <Property>
          <Name>RANK</Name> 
          <Type>Int64</Type> 
          <Value>1000</Value> 
        </Property>
      </Properties>
    </Document>
...
...
...
...
...

    </Results>
  </Range>
  <Status>SUCCESS</Status> 
  </Response>
</ResponsePacket>

In other word, it says it can find 34 hits, but returns blank data. Doing a reset of the search content, a full crawl, everything works for a day or so, then it gets corrupted again. Full crawl at 02:00, incremental crawl every 20 minutes, MOSS v12.0.0.6300 on Win2003 x86. The crawl log files says nothing of interest.

Anyone has any ideas?

Answer 1

So, it seems that I have found the solution, or a fix. A little bird whispered in my ear to apply the latest MOSS Service Pack, which I did.

Now the site(s) has been running for over 20 days without any search corruptions, so I can almost certainly say that SP2 fixed the issue.

Answer 2

It could be corruption in the underlying SQL Server search database (most likely caused by I/O subsystem issues). Try running the following SQL Server command on the search database - if it gives any results, you have corruption problems (post the results and I can interpret them for you - I wrote DBCC CHECKDB).

DBCC CHECKDB (searchdbname) WITH ALL_ERRORMSGS, NO_INFOMSGS

Hope this helps (and isn't your problem :-)