Tridion 5.3 Search not working correctly

Question

We're experiencing two problems with the Tridion Search functionality:

1. The Tridion Search Service (cm_srch_svc.exe) consumes much CPU. Multiple times per day, the CPU usage is so high that the machine does no longer respond and seems to hang. After a minute or so, the problem disappears.
2. The hard drive of the machine is getting full. More specifically, the directory G:\Progs\BT2TRI\101\Search\pdd\ contains about 50GB of data (about 34000 files). There are files for each (working) day since the Tridion installation date (June 2011) up till today. The files are bigger and bigger (June 2011: 9kB per file; Sep 2014: 3070kB per file).

We do a daily mkvdk in order to optimize the Verity collection (as described in the Administration Guide, section 5.1).

However, we DON'T perform 'Synchronizing your Search collection' (Administration Guide, section 5.3), in order to rebuild the search index (using the SynchronizerGUI.exe tool). Could this be the cause of our problems?

I'm a bit afraid to break our old Tridion 5.3 environment. I don't know whether running the SynchronizerGUI tool would break anything. Or how long it would run, considering that it hasn't ever been executed before...

Could anyone tell what the risks are (if any), and whether running this tool could solve our problems in the first place?

Thanks in advance,

Frank

Answer 1

The worst that can happen is that you'll mess up your search index and have to recreate it (which is perhaps not such a bad thing).

IIRC, what "Synchronizing" will do is completely rebuild your search index - getting rid of all the small temp files you see now, and consolidating it all under one big optimized index instead. We used to recommend to running this weekly, and the optimize job daily.

I would give it a try on a weekend - make sure you backup the verity folders before you run it, and if it all gets borked for some reason, just copy back the folder(s).

Answer 2

In Addition to what Nuno has said, below are my 2 cents:

• Typically, running this tool should resolve your issue and also improve the performance of your search but running it may take few hours or may be a day depending on the Content you have in your CMS system and your server configurations

• Before you run this tool, take a backup of your search folder. So that in case there is any issue or in case you have to abort this tool due to some urgency, you have to option to rollback

• AFAIK, the verity indexes are created per publication basis and you may choose to run this tool per publication or for a small collection of publication instead of choosing all publications at once

• Further if you have a lots of transactions in the CMS on a daily basis, you may choose to have your mkvdk (optimize & tuneup commands) run twice daily (every 12 hours) and this synchronizer tool to run every week

Answer 3

There's at least 3 different maintenance commands you can run for Search in R5.3. You don't mention GA / SP1, so I'm referencing "SDL Tridion R5 Maintenance Guide 5.3 SP1".

• Section 5.1 has

  mkvdk -charmap utf8 -locale uni -optimize tuneup -collection <collection path>
  This is the tuneup while the search collection is still being used.
  General recommendation is to run this daily.

• Section 5.2 has

  mkvdk.exe -locale uni -charmap utf8 -optimize maxclean
  This is a more through cleanup of the system, but can't be run while the collection is in use.
  General recommendation is to run this weekly.

• Section 5.3 has the 'SynchronizerGUI.exe', which rebuilds the entire collection.

It's likely your 2 issues will be resolved by the command in section 5.2. Since this is the first time running, I'd plan on it taking the weekend. Thereafter, you want to run it at least monthly, maybe weekly, depending on how frequently content is updated.

I don't recall ever recommending weekly rebuilds (command in section 5.3); However, if it's been 3 years, a rebuild isn't a bad idea.