Disabling Indexing On the Synology DS216+

After 6 years, I finally upgraded my Synology DS209 to a DS216j, and still find indexing to be a problem service that I want to turn off. A few things I found out about how the indexing service is setup on the newer DS216j:

1) Finding the running index processes:
ps ax|grep index
6291 ? SNs 0:00 /usr/syno/sbin/synoindexd
6788 ? SN 0:00 /usr/syno/sbin/synoindexscand
6789 ? SN 0:00 /usr/syno/sbin/synoindexworkerd
6790 ? SN 0:00 /usr/syno/sbin/synoindexplugind
22715 pts/3 S+ 0:00 grep –color=auto index

2) Indexing is controlled through an Upstart job located at /usr/syno/sbin/synoindexd
You can review all Upstart jobs by issuing the command “initctl list”

3) If you want to look at the index job specifically, issue the “initctl show-config synoindexd” command to reveal the specifics of the job:

synoindexd
start on started pgsql-adapter
stop on stopping pgsql-adapter

4) If you want to review the script itself, open the /etc/init/synoindexd.conf file:

description “configure network device”
author “Web Application Team”

start on started pgsql-adapter
stop on stopping pgsql-adapter

expect fork

respawn
respawn limit 5 10

pre-start script

# make sure pgsql is running
if /usr/syno/sbin/synoservice –is-enabled pgsql > /dev/null 2>&1; then
echo “PGSQL service is disabled. Skip…”
stop
exit 1
fi

end script

exec /usr/syno/sbin/synoindexd

post-stop script
echo “Stopping Synology Index Daemon…”
killall synoindexscand > /dev/null 2>&1 || true
killall synoindexworkerd > /dev/null 2>&1 || true
killall synoindexplugind > /dev/null 2>&1 || true
killall synomediaparserd > /dev/null 2>&1 || true
end script

 

Notice that the index script is tied to the Postgresql database start. If you try killing the index service with a “kill -9” command it will kill the process, and then restart it. I have not yet tried, but perhaps the best way to stop the index service is to edit the /etc/init/synoindexd.conf file and change the “start on started pgsql-adapter” line to “stop on started pgsql-adapter.”

I will update this post as I try this solution.