Thursday, October 23, 2008

Lowering the Number of Verity Threads on Servers with Large Number of Collections

With our 55+ collections - we have some suggested ways to better manage the amount of threads that Verity has to manage. Below is the suggestion direct form Adobe Tier 3 ColdFusion/Jrun support consultants.

So, the suggested workaround to prevent the issue of collectionnames being ‘switched’ is to lower the number of threads assigned to each collection in Verity. Verity support had indicated this is an issue they are familiar with. They see it when the ratio of (total number of threads/CPU) gets high. Your total threads is about 165 now (55 collections * 3 threads). They suggest lowering the threads per collection to 2. Note, it is generally not recommended you use less than 2 threads per collection. One thread per collection may work for collections that are not heavily used.

You can update the threads per collection by running Verity RCAdmin. I have pasted below the output from my updating a “linuxarchive” collection. You will run the rcadmin from your verity_root\k2\_nt40\bin directory in a DOS window.
1. type in rcadmin
2. at rcadmin prompt type in indexattach
3. type in collectionname for index alias
4. enter ‘c’ for collection
5. enter the search server alias (ColdFusionK2_server1)
6. modify type is update = 0
7. index state is online = 2
8. Threads is the update you are making. All collections have 3 threads currently, which you should change to 2.
9. save changes=y
You should do this for each of your collections. Once you have updated all the collections you will need to stop and restart the Verity search service.


I have recently done this on our beta environment and the numbers fell from about 270 threads (task manager - Processes - view - Select columns - thread count) to 210 or so. We'll see how this effects overall management of the collections. This is not necessary on servers with lower number of managed collections.

No comments: