Error 0x80040e97 can occur when indexing large document with integrated full-text search

When you index large or complex documents with SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 integrated full-text search, you may receive timeout errors similar to the following:

While indexing data types such as varbinary, varbinary(max), image or xml,  SQL Server sends data to the filter daemon process (fdhost.exe) for indexing.   At any point during indexing, SQL Server will not wait for more than 60 seconds for fdhost.exe to respond.  For large XML documents, the XML Filter hosted by fdhost.exe, reads in all the data from SQL Server and stores it in a temporary file.  It then starts to process the XML content for filtering and word-breaking. If this process takes more than 60 seconds, then SQL Server terminates that batch and retries the operation with a smaller batch size. If an individual XML document is so big that it takes fdhost.exe more than 60 seconds to filter and break the words, then you can experience error documented in the Symptoms section.   

Note: The issue can happen with any IFilter that writes data to a temporary file.

You can resolve this problem by increasing the full-text indexing time out  value by calling sp_fulltext_service with ‘ft_timeout’ as the first parameter and a number (in terms of milliseconds) as the second parameter.

The example below will increase full-text indexing timeout to 20 minutes for any individual document.

Important: After executing the above stored procedure, you need to restart your SQL Server for the new setting to take effect.

Error 0x80040e97 can also be raised for other reasons as well. For example, you may see the same error code when SQL Server experiences issues loading an iFilter. Increasing the Timeout value in such cases may mask the error and prevent effective troubleshooting. Therefore, we recommend that you verify the size of the document and confirm that the size of the failing document is exceptionally large before you increase the timeout value.   

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