Mark's web presence nothing very exciting, just some guy's web presence

The standard search module does have an "items to index per cron run" but I added one that is specific to search_attachments, since extracting text from external files will likely take more time than pulling HTML from the database and it might be good to be able to compensate for that difference. On every cron run, 1) the search_attachments_files table (the one that you screensnapped above) is updated, i.e., new files are added onto the end of the table, changed files have their 'changed' attribute updated to reflect when they were last modified, and files that were deleted are removed from the table, and 2) the module's hook_update_index() is called by cron and the files that need to be reindexed/indexed for the first time according to a query on the search_attachments_files table are indexed. Search_attachments' "items to index per cron run" determines how many rows are pulled from the table druing that run. The query asks for files that have changed since the last time they were indexed (new files or ones that could not be indexed for some reason have a 'last_indexed' value of 0).

Last night, I added an option for admins to change the maximum timeout limit for Drupal during indexing. Drupal already sets this to 240 seconds of PHP execution time but search_attachments might need more. This setting might help in cases like yours. I'll be interested to see if it does. I'm already cooking up an algorithm that gets the sizes of the files queued up for indexing during the current cron run, determines if there are any 'big' files in this group, and adjusts the number of files it processes accordingly. Just a thought at this point but it might be necessary to add some adaptive file processing of this sort to handle large files.