I am hoping to understand the cause of this and hopefully find a solution - I have looked at every possible solution, but haven't been able to fix it.

Sitecore v8.2 update 3 using SOLR.

In my current set up, Core DB is not shared between CM and CD servers. Index update strategy for web db is onPublishEndAsync.

I created a new item and published it. Item was published to the web db, but the item didn't appear in the index. I thought perhaps core db might have a play in this. So, I changed the settings as follows.

1. Both CM and CD servers to share the core db.
2. Set up the InstanceName and Publishing.PublishingInstance instance name on CM and CD servers.
3. Updated the eventqueue polling interval to 1 minute.
4. Changed the crawling log to add debug information.

Index is still not updated and the message that I see in the logs is 'Event Queue is empty. Incremental update returns'

What could be the cause of it?