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Michael Greth MVP SharePoint Blog — Mon, 25 May 2009 11:52:28 GMT

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re: Thinking Big – Search Scale and Performance on a Budget

Paul — Sun, 24 May 2009 22:06:47 GMT

Hey Nate:

Excellent points.

Some additional comments for readers (I know you know all of this already):

1. Very large systems need to be more concerned about 2nd order effects overwhelming the system. These are things like hardware failures, configuration complexity, network traffic, etc.

This is why I often like splitting large systems into multiple smaller, independent systems when things get big. For example, two 5-row FAST installations may be, overall, more reliable than one large 10-row system for query scalability.

2. Just to emphasize that indexing is very expensive, and a high-bandwidth indexing application (i.e. very frequent updates) will use up a lot of resources.

So, if possible, make some servers "static" - i.e. no new documents (deletes are okay, they execute very quickly). This will free up large amounts of resource for query and will allow you to pack on more documents per node increasing document count scalability. Of course, doing this is tricky and requires some careful architectural analysis.

Going along with this, indexing is more efficient the larger the number of documents are included in a batch. For example, if indexing 10 documents requires X, then indexing 1000 documents may only require X*2. The larger the batch, the more efficient. This further emphases the value of centralizing indexing onto a small number of nodes - if possible.

Of course, a lot of these ideas are non-standard configurations. :-)

Also, they have other issues - such as interfering with default relevancy ranking TF/IDF formula and increasing configuration complexity...

Which is all to say: don't bother unless you're doing something really big. Otherwise, just buy an extra server or two and don't worry about it.

Thinking Big ??? Search Scale and Performance on a Budget | Microsoft Share Point

Fri, 22 May 2009 23:15:48 GMT

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