Anyone out there using FTS on ARS 7? If so, I have some questions about your experiences:
First off (this is one of my development servers): ARS 7.0.1 patch 2, Windows 2003 SP1, SQL 2000 SP4, Java 1.5.0_11 So I recently purchased some FTS fixed user licenses and I've applied them to one of my development servers where I have a bunch of home grown apps, one of which is a help desk application. I've marked two zero-length character fields (i.e. long text fields) for full text indexing (the problem description and the work log). Upon saving the form, the initial indexing starts (fine), but now my admin tool is "locked" and will either time our after an unusually long period of time, or will remain locked until the indexing is complete. Also, from a client perspective, the server is COMPLETELY UNAVAILABLE (ARERR 93 - timeout during data retrieval due to busy server -- retry the operation). While I expect that an initial FT index would take some time to complete on 70,000 records, I do not expect the indexing operation to tie up the server so terribly that clients can't even log in. It doesn't appear to be a resource issue, arserver.exe is only using between 5 and 20 percent of the CPU, and as of right now, there is nearly 3GB of physical RAM available. At first I thought it might be a thread thing, so I upped fast/list/ ftindexer threads to min 4 max 32 (from min 2 max 4), but that doesn't seem to have made a difference. I have plans to also implement FTS on my CSS servers, where I'd like to index the Issue Details field on the SPRT:Issue form and the Interaction Notes field on the SPRT:Interaction field, as those fields are heavily searched. However, based on some initial testing I've done, performing an initial index on the Issue Details field on about 200,000 records takes about 95 minutes to complete (that's a reasonable amount of time IMHO), but the server is completely unavailable while indexing. OK, that's not so bad, but when I started to calculate some rough times for the SPRT:Interaction form, I was coming up with times in excess of five and a half hours (about 700,000 records). So, to upgrade my production CS servers to ARS 7, I'm looking at 30-60 minutes to upgrade arserver, email, mid-tier, etc., about 90 minutes to index one field on SPRT:Issue, and roughly 5.5 hours to index one field on SPRT:Interaction. This adds up to (again, approximately) eight full hours (or more) of complete and utter downtime (not a good deal for a 24x7 shop). Thoughts? Other stories to share? Thanks everyone. Mike Wallick _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are"
