Indexer

Nosto for Magento adds a customer indexer to the existing Magento indexer.

The indexer can be used drastically improve the performance of synchronizing the product catalog with Nosto. The indexer can be found by navigating to the Index Management view in the Magento settings.

Indexing Mode: Update On Save

We recommend you keep your indexer mode to be "Update on Save" and this is the default mode.

When the indexer is run in this mode, all product updates are instantaneously sent to Nosto. In the event that there is a noticeable performance impact, switch your indexer to the other mode.

Indexing Mode: Update By Schedule

If you have a large product catalog or a high-traffic site, we recommend you switch the indexer mode to be "Update by Schedule".

When the indexer is run in this mode, all product updates are not instantaneously sent to Nosto, but instead deferred until the next cron execution.

Running indexer manually

You can run a full reindex of the product catalog by using Magento's built-in CLI indexer. To reindex all products, run:

php ./shell/indexer.php --reindex nosto_indexer

If you update your store product periodically (from some ERP system for example) it's a good idea to run the indexer manually after the product update. Also, if you use catalog price rules and your product catalog is large you should run the indexer periodically.

Technical overview

Nosto's product indexer uses Magento's built-in indexer logic. In practice Nosto indexer saves a serialized Nosto product object into a database. When Magento indicates that product data has been changed Nosto indexer will save the product data into the Nosto index if product data significant to Nosto was changed.

When indexer is used, product API calls to Nosto are made only when Nosto product data has been changed.