Global Search ad hoc indexing or reducing the time for the scheduled task?

Global Search ad hoc indexing or reducing the time for the scheduled task?

by Kathrin Osswald -
Number of replies: 2

Hi there,

we're about to launching the global search on our production site (it will be Moodle 3.2 then).

However, we're not sure if new content will be added to the index ad hoc or at least in a short time period after the creation?

Assuming there won't be an ad hoc indexing, the default value for the scheduled task ist set to 30 minutes. So the index won't be updated within these 30 minutes and new stuff cannot be found by the global search.

In this case, we thought about reducing the scheduled task period down to 5 minutes, but we are afraid that this could cause negative performance side effects !?

Does somebody has experience with this topic or advise?

Best regards, Kathrin

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In reply to Kathrin Osswald

Re: Global Search ad hoc indexing or reducing the time for the scheduled task?

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

The indexing is handled by apache solr and java - thus whatever resources that would consume is what you need to research when it comes to affects upon performance of the site.

If running linux and one has access to command line, run top from an ssh session.   Then in another ssh session, execute the task associated with global search.   You should see java kick in.

So if your server is an all in one .... ie, web (moodle code), DB server on same box, obviously running another daemon will eat up more memory and when it executes more cpu cycles.

Been my experience (on 16Gig memory boxen) that indexing of new content is usually pretty fast and while there is a spike it's not been something that one notices overall.   Obviously, an all in one server running 4 or 8 Gig may not perform as well.

'spirit of sharing', Ken




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In reply to Kathrin Osswald

Re: Global Search ad hoc indexing or reducing the time for the scheduled task?

by David Monllaó -
Hi Kathrin,


No negative performance side effects are expected; I would check it in test env by replicating your production environment though. The indexing process goes through all search areas looking for new records (i.e. timemodified > $lasttimechecked) indexing should be quite fast if there is much new stuff to index. You can monitor your indexing times and adjust the time period according to them.

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