Increase SharePoint Search Index File Size Limit

Problem: There are many Design documents uploaded to a SharePoint 2010 document library in Microsoft Word format on a Team site. Users reported these documents aren’t appearing in search results.

Same time found in crawl logs: “This item was partially parsed. The item has been truncated in the index because it exceeds the maximum size.” error.

Root cause: This is because the SharePoint search crawler doesn’t index large files > 16 MB by default! (in SharePoint 2010. For SharePoint 2013 & 2016, it’s 64 MB) I confirmed that the documents uploaded are about 20 MB each! So, SharePoint crawls only the metadata associated with the document and skips the contents inside the file!

Solution: Increase SharePoint search index file size limit

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

$SSA = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
#Get the current size
$SSA.GetProperty("MaxDownloadSize")

#Increase maximum file size in Crawl - indexer
$SSA.SetProperty("MaxDownloadSize", 100)
$SSA.Update()

This will increase the maximum size of files to index to 100 MB. Restart Search Service for the changes to take effect and run a Full Crawl! You can also set the maximum size for a specific file type. E.g. MaxDownloadSizeExcel.