WTF Next?

If you have large files in a content source that is being indexed by Sharepoint you might run into the following error message:

“The file reached the maximum download limit. Check that the full text of the document can be meaningfully crawled.”

This is usually caused because SharePoint’s MaxDownloadSize setting is set lower than the size of the file you are attempting to index. You can increase this value, restart the service then kick off a full crawl in order to fix this issue, but SharePoint 2007 and 2010 have different methods for accomplishing this task.

Sharepoint 2007

Open up the Registry editor and increase the MaxDownloadSize value to a number (in MB) higher than the largest file being indexed. You can find this at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Search\1.0\Gathering Manager

After you increase the size, cycle the search service and kick off a full crawl of the content source in question.

Sharepoint 2010

With SharePoint 2010 you can use PowerShell via the Sharepoint 2010 Console in order to change the MaxDownloadSize. Execute the following commands to update the value:

   1: $ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication

   2: $ssa.SetProperty(“MaxDownloadSize”, <new size in MB>)

   3: $ssa.Update()

References:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287231

http://blogs.technet.com/b/brent/archive/2010/07/19/sharepoint-server-2010-maxdownloadsize-and-maxgrowfactor.aspx

A month or so ago I was working on a feature for a project that required a level of anonymity on the Sharepoint site in order to function. At the same time I was also working on another feature that required access to the Sharepoint search.asmx web service. I found out, the hard way, that the Sharepoint Web Services do not operate in an expected way while the IIS site is under anonymous access. Even though these web services expect requests with certain permissions (in theory) they never attempt to request those credentials when the web service is contacted. As a result the services return a 401 Unauthorized response.

The fix for my situation was to restrict anonymous access to the area that needed it (in this case the control in question had support for being used in an ASP.NET app that I could throw in a virtual directory). After that I removed anonymous access from IIS for the site itself and the QueryService requests were working once more.

Here’s a related article with a bit more depth about a similar experience:
http://chrisdomino.com/Blog/Post/401-Reasons-Why-SharePoint-Web-Services-Don-t-Work-Anonymously?Length=4