Site Server Search Incremental Crawls Index Documents that Are Unmodified. (259600)



The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Site Server 3.0

This article was previously published under Q259600

SYMPTOMS

When you configure Microsoft Site Server Search to perform an incremental crawl, Active Server Pages (ASP) documents get reindexed even though the last-modified date field in the file's header has not changed.

CAUSE

When an HTTP client does a GET that specifies a static file (HTML) and an if-modified-since header with a time T1, the IIS Server checks the last-modified time in the file system (T2), and returns:

200 OK if T2 > T1
304 OK if T2 = T1
					

The last-modified time is included in the header as well.

For dynamic files (such as ISAPI, ASP, and Common Gateway Interface [CGI] file types) no preconditions are verified on a GET request. This fact is contained in the response cache-control header if you set it to "private". The design of ASP is to return a different page each time it is called so dynamic files are not cached.

Microsoft Internet Information Server does not send a "304 Not Modified" response to Site Server Search if the file is dynamic. The result is that Search always retrieves dynamic files, even if the last-modified time is set in the header.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, do not include static data that must be indexed in dynamic files.

Modification Type:MajorLast Reviewed:5/18/2000
Keywords:kbprb KB259600