IFilters IFilters do a lot of the heavy lifting for the daemons during a crawl. The IFilter specification documents how to write an IFilter. Once an IFilter is written and deployed then it can be used by various crawling engines, including SharePoint...

Site Hit Frequency Rules The Site Hit Frequency rule (SHF) is a very powerful tool for performance. As I have come to learn, many people do not really understand it or how to use it to help them out on performance tuning. When tuning the gatherer...

SQL performance I think it goes without saying that if performance of the SQL server is not running at its highest then it will definitely slow things down in SharePoint. However, there are times that even if SQL is running at its highest that actions...

Now that we have discussed some of the main counters. Let's take a closer look to see how to use this information to improve our crawl performance. Resource Usage/Performance Level The value seen in the Search Gatherer\Performance Level directly...

To continue the discussion of Crawl Performance, we will look at some additional counters that will help with further analysis of state of the crawler. Here we will expand on the counters we have reviewed before and see what information can be collected...

To continue the discussion of Crawl Performance, we will look at some additional counters that help with further diagnosing the state of the crawler. Here we will expand our subset a little bit and see what information can be collected from them. ...

Where to Start I prefer to work with real time data but the same thing can be done with perf logs. In part 1 (see SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Crawl performance part 1 I listed each of the perf counters that should be logged and the ones that we are...

From time to time, I get asked about how to determine why the SPS 2003 crawler/gatherer take a long time to crawl data and build the index. There are many reasons for this but it takes some digging to really determine the exact cause. In this series I...

I am currently a Senior Escalation Engineer for the SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services team. I started with Microsoft in Feb. 2000 as an Escalation Engineer (EE). An EE is typically the last line of support for most products within...