AEM installation error “No style has been found until search path threshold”

Description description

Environment

Issue/Symptoms

After installing AEM 6.5.17, many log messages with No style has been found until search path threshold may appear upon accessing particular pages.

*ERROR* [ NN.NN.NN.NN [ 1681216960934]  GET /content/path/to/heavy-page.html HTTP/1.1]  com.day.cq.wcm.core.impl.designer.SearchPathLimiter
No style has been found until search path threshold: 10000 was reached.

This article explains the cause and how to cope with the error.

Resolution resolution

When page content has a deep node hierarchy with nested containers, AEM takes a long time to search for styles for each component. Sometimes the response time becomes very long, even up to a few hours.

Example:

Page
  Layout container 1
    Layout container 2
      Layout container 3
        Layout container 4
          Layout container 5
            :
            Text component

To improve the response time, AEM 6.5.17 introduced a circuit breaker for searching the styles. When AEM terminates the search, it logs No style has been found until search path threshold in the error.log.

Check if the page of the error is displayed correctly, as that implies there may be a layout corruption by missing a style.

Long-term solution

Consider reducing the nesting hierarchy of the page content.

Tentative workaround

Increasing the upper limit of the circuit breaker will reduce the error frequency.

To find the upper limit, go to Web console > OSGi > Configuration > Designer Factory Configuration > search path threshold.

This parameter has a default value of 10000. If there is no performance issue with the page where the error appears, it should be fine with a large number, e.g., 1000000.