Best practices for indexer configuration

To optimize and maintain site performance, review and update the indexer configuration using the performance best practices described in this article.

Affected products and versions

All supported versions of:

• Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure
• Adobe Commerce on-premises

Set indexers to update on a schedule

Adobe Commerce has two types of indexer modes: Update on Save (default setting) and Update on Schedule.

• Update on Save mode updates indexes immediately whenever your catalog or other data changes. For example, if an Admin user adds new products to a category, the category products index is reindexed immediately when the update is saved.

• Update on Schedule mode stores information about data updates, and reindexing operations and index updates are managed by a cron job that runs in the background at scheduled intervals.

Having a large store with multiple Admins working in the backend or having many imports and exports triggers frequent index updates. If your site index configuration is set to Update on Save mode, frequent reindexing degrades database performance which slows site performance and causes long delays in the reindexing process, especially for large stores.

To maximize site performance, follow these best practices for indexing:

• Review the index configuration.
• Set the indexers to Update on Schedule for large sites, and sites with frequent updates and heavy traffic. See Index Management.
• Follow performance best practices for managing indexes.

Additional information

• Index Management for Admin users
• Index Management using the Magento CLI
• Indexing overview for developers