SearchBeta Hardware Configuration

SharePoint & Search Server Scale & Perf

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog — Sun, 04 May 2008 04:03:12 GMT

If you're interested in Scale and Performance guidance for Search in SharePoint Server and Search Server

re: SearchBeta Hardware Configuration

Ed Sawdon — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:28:01 GMT

I'm really interested in what strategies you have for performing full index builds and how to minimise the time taken. If you don't do regular full builds, then how do you maintain coherency of the index and how do you manage software updates to the indexer (e.g. new Filters necessitating a full index build)?

re: SearchBeta Hardware Configuration

Dan Blood — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:07:45 GMT

SearchBeta Hardware Configuration

Ed, SearchBeta does not have *full* crawls scheduled at all. Doing so on a regular basis is far too expensive and would make it impossible to maintain freshness of the index.

There are, however, special cases that do require full crawls as you’ve identified (eg. new IFilters, Word Breakers, etc...) The way I handle these is through directed full crawls on an content source, by content source basis. There are 11 content sources on SearchBeta. I pay close attention to the predetermined business priorities for each content source and "premier" sites are crawled first. In general I only full crawl one content source at a time, using the method described in the recent post “Creating crawl schedules and starvation - How to detect it and minimize it” as a guide to when the next content source should be started. During this period of full crawls the lower priority content sources may be paused or have their schedules removed to reduce starvation.

Bottom-line priorities for each content source need to be identified and followed. You will need to make the hard call to pause crawling of lower priority content sources in favor of getting the high priority content source back into a steady state.

SQL Index defrag and maintenance tasks for Search

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:00:12 GMT

Hi all, this topic is an area that has caused me much pain and work.  My goal for this was to follow

SQL Index defrag and maintenance tasks for Search

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:43:46 GMT

Hi all, this topic is an area that has caused me much pain and work.  My goal for this was to follow