Marc - We built our index maintenance operation to assume a breakdown would occur in process (because it happened several times.) We exist in an environment where "always on, always available" is a business requirement. We also do a lot of updates on a cyclical basis (every 10 minutes), so malfeasance in index updates must be limited/eliminated.
We *don't* update the same index used by our searchers. We have a distributed system with the index allocated among a number of servers, and the primary source index resides on a system that performs index management (update, optimization, etc.) The search servers are responsible only for making search available. By de-coupling these tasks, we reduce contention on both reads & writes to the particular indexes (source index for writes, replicated index for reads). The net cost of this is duplicating storage of the index, but we need a backup of the files anyway and disk is cheap. For our operation, this works like a champ and our availability is in 5-9's territory. Hope this helps. -- j On 5/12/06, Marc Dauncey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi everyone, Just wanted to get peoples views on an indexing issue. I gather a lot of people have apps where indexing writes to the same index as is used by the searcher. The thing that bothers me about this is if indexing is interrupted (file system crash, out of disk space etc) the index becomes unusable. This seems too risky in terms of keeping searching available 24/7. My first question is, if an index does become corrupt because of an interrupted operation, is the situation recoverable? Is it simply a matter of managing the index locks? My second question is do people back up their indexes before working on them? If you do, then how do you manage this for large indexes? What kind of strategies have you put in place to make your systems robust and available? Many thanks for your advice Marc --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
