SharePoint 2016 : Auto-Indexing List View (5000 Items Threshold)

Like SharePoint 2013, in SharePoint 2016 the List View Threshold is also set to 5,000 however, a lot of improvements have been made to avoid users running into the 5000 item limit error that would otherwise require site admins to create Indexes on columns for the purpose of viewing items in the lists/views.

With Improvements in this area, SharePoint 2016 introduces a new Timer job called “Large list column index management” which examines the views in Lists that exceed 2,500 items and then determines the appropriate columns to create an index on. The index column choice depends on the filters of the view and other view definitions in the list as well. 
Firstly, for each list a newly introduced setting “Automatic Index Management” should be set to “yes” for the timer job to start considering auto indexing on the list. By default, this setting is enabled on the list. Site admins can confirm this from List Settings -> Advanced settings -> Automatic Index Management.

Site admins can also run the PowerShell to check if the setting is enabled or not.

Large list column index management Timer Job – This is a new Timer Job introduced to handle auto creation of indexes when required on various views within each list in SharePoint 2016. Like a List View Threshold, this timer job also runs per Web application.

To verify if the job is listed and running on a web app, navigate to Timer Job definitions in Central admin and select the web application to list all the timer jobs running on it.

Site admins can also verify if the job is running on a particular Web Application using the below PowerShell

$w = Get-WebApplication -Name “Web Application Name”

Get-SPTimerJob -WebApplication $w -Identity job-list-automatic-index-management

If you would like to start the timer job, you can use the following PowerShell

Start-SPTimerJob -Identity job-list-automatic-index-management

If you need to check the Indexes being created on your list, you can use the following SPList FieldIndexes property.

$SiteUrl = “http://sp2016vm:4430″
$web = Get-SPWeb $SiteUrl
$web.Lists[“Document Center”].fields.FieldIndexes

Use the following to get the count of Indexes

$web.Lists[“Document Center”].fields.FieldIndexes.count

In addition to the user created views, improvements in several other areas have also been made. For example, Out of the box Document Library views have been improved to address throttling related to sort ordering. The folder first sort criteria is omitted in the event it would result in throttling of the query.