Alfresco search slow

[warrenzhai]

I have setup Alfresco and uploaded ~2GB worth of office documents.  The average return time for a search is ~30 seconds.  Is this normal?

[andy]

Hi

No.

What is your search and how are you doing it?

Regards

Andy

[warrenzhai]

I would input 1 or 2 words such as "SWIFT 7775" or "Repo Transaction" as typical users would search on a google-like engine.  The response time from Alfresco is typically ~15 to ~30 seconds. 

I work for a very large financial company, and I have introduced Alfresco successfully at the department level.  Now the initiative has caught senior management attention, and I need hard-hitting evidence that Alfresco could handle the volume of data this requires.  Please help.

I am using Alfresco 1.3 right now and evaluating the beta version of 1.4.

[kevinr]

The Lucene search queries built in 1.4 are improved over 1.3 - so if you are able to try 1.4 with the same data you should find an improvement. However you numbers still seem very slow! You could try configuring the system to place the Lucene indexes on a different disk (which is known to help).

Thanks,

Kevin

[paulhh]

Hi

There are also other options that can be configured, including:
- interpret multiple search terms as AND'd rather than OR'd
- limit the query result size
- limit the time taken to evaluate the search
- limit the number of results that have permission evaluated

Cheers
Paul.

[derek]

Hi,

Under certain circumstances, it was possible to issue searches that hit the server excessively hard and took too long to return  (http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/AR-1064).  A separate bug in the cache configurations was also causing issues (http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/AR-1108).

What is the performance like if you search for a specific document, i.e. you expect exactly one result to be returned?

You could do your tests using an Enterprise Trial.

Regards

[warrenzhai]

This is great!  I will try to optimize the configuration on my installation as well as evaluate version 1.4.

I will report back my results.