Do I really need to reboot Confluence when rebuilding the site Index?

[Martin James]

A user profile can't be found on our Confluence even though their account is still active.

A simple rebuild of the site index will quickly fix this problem.

Do I really need to reboot Confluence to do this?

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-rebuild-the-content-indexes-from-scratch-on-confluence-server-110035351.html

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If you are just rebuilding from the UI, then no.

However, if you are (as in the article) you are dropping out to the command line and removing files, then yes, as Confluence will hold some of the index files open so you can't delete them and it'll lose references to them.  You need to restart to allow it to create the new empty indices so it can populate them when you reindex.