DocumentationExperience Cloud KCS

Resolve performance issues with page operations in AEM Cloud Service caused by custom index configuration

Last update: October 16, 2026

This article describes how to identify and resolve severe performance issues during page move, delete, and copy operations in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Cloud Service that custom search index configurations aggregating deeply nested content nodes can cause.

Description description

Environment

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Cloud Service

Issue/Symptoms

  • Significant delays or failures occur when you perform page operations such as move, delete, copy, or create language copies.
  • Operations take an unusually long time to complete or do not finish at all, blocking content authoring activities and affecting production timelines.
  • The job console shows many page move and delete actions in an error state, but logs do not provide a clear reason for the failure.
  • Thread dumps indicate high CPU usage by indexing threads during these operations.

Cause

This issue is often linked to custom search indexes configured to aggregate content across many levels of child nodes, triggering excessive re-indexing and resource consumption during page operations.

Resolution resolution

Follow these steps to resolve the issue:

  1. Review your custom search index configurations in AEM, focusing on indexes that aggregate content across multiple levels of child nodes, such as aggregating more than a few levels deep.
  2. Check whether recent changes to custom indexes coincide with the start of performance issues during page move, delete, or copy operations.
  3. Use the AEM job console to identify page move or delete jobs that are in an error state during the affected period.
  4. Analyze thread dumps or monitoring tools for high CPU usage by indexing threads when you perform these operations.
  5. Temporarily disable the problematic custom index that causes excessive re-indexing.
  6. Update the index definition to remove or comment out the aggregation rules, or deploy a new version of the index without the problematic configuration.
  7. Deploy the updated index configuration across all affected environments in your AEM Cloud Service deployment.
  8. After the change, test page move, delete, and copy operations to confirm that performance has returned to normal.
  9. Monitor the job console and logs to ensure that operations complete successfully and that no new errors appear.
  10. For future custom index changes, increment the index version and allow the AEM Cloud indexing and rollout process to complete before you promote the change. Use simplified index management practices to avoid manual versioning and to ensure proper cleanup of old index versions.
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