topic Search performance issues using searchService in Alfresco Archive

Search performance issues using searchService

lista — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 13:29:48 GMT

Hi all,i have about 70k nodes, under a structure like this:-main space–subspace based on node's first character—node—nodeSearching for a specific node is a practically instant through Alfresco Explorer, but when using API it takes about 7 seconds (just to show the difference). Here's the concrete co

Re: Search performance issues using searchService

afaust — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 08:45:22 GMT

Hello,

this is related to how sorting works in Lucene. When you sort by a field, all existing values of that field are read from Lucene into memory to be pre-sorted. Then, the actual results are sorted by looking up the index of the concrete value in the pre-sorted list. If you have a field that has a lot of different values, you can end up with a large overhead, depending on how fast Lucene can read the value range into memory (I/O).

The alternatives:
a) Don't sort by fields with extremely distinct values
b) Use alternative sort fields that are applicable only to a specific context (e.g. when you search over a 10k subset of your 70k nodes, a field that is only used in your specific subset).
c) Consider upgrading to 4.0 and use the alternatives available there (CannedQuery / SOLR)

Regards
Axel

Re: Search performance issues using searchService

andy — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:13:30 GMT

Hi

Later enterprise releases fo 3.4 do ordering in memory and fall back to lucene if there are too many docs in the results (which is configurable)
I am not sure which community product this is in - or destined to be in ….

Look for the properties:

lucene.indexer.useInMemorySort=true
lucene.indexer.maxRawResultSetSizeForInMemorySort=1000

Andy

Re: Search performance issues using searchService

lista — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:02:02 GMT

Thank you both for your answers.
For now, we decided to limit the sorting options in order to make our life easier. We'll get back to this in the near future, and I'll be sure to share our results/knowledge here.