The Content Feeder can use partial updates if only content metadata has changed. This means, it does not need to send the whole content to the search engine but just a small set of changed metadata, for example a changed path after contents have been moved to another place in the repository. This can greatly improve performance, especially if lots of contents are affected and expensive operations such as parsing text from PDF can be avoided.

The Content Feeder can use partial updates, if the connected search engine supports it. Apache Solr supports partial updates if index fields are configured with stored="true" or docValues="true" as in the default configuration. See the description of the configuration properties feeder.solr.partial-updates.enabled, feeder.solr.partial-updates.skip-index-check and feeder.partialUpdate.aspects in Section 4.9.1, “Content Feeder Properties” in Deployment Manual for more details.