Domino on Linux/Unix, Troubleshooting, Best Practices, Tips and more ...

 
alt

Daniel Nashed

 

Full Text Index on separate Drive

Daniel Nashed  4 October 2011 08:32:17


Since 8.5.3 (available as of today) we have the option to put the Full Text Index on another drive. We have asked about it many times for many years and finally got this functionality.
The notes.ini parameter e.g. FTBasePath=d:\full_text can be used to switch the starting directory for the full text index from data directory to a different directory or drive.

It makes a lot of sense to separate the FT Index from the NSF data in larger environments.
There are a couple of reasons

- FT Index causes a lot of file-system fragmentation
- At some point even with DAOS on larger environments the file-system for NSF data can be quite big and separating FT and NSF would make sense.
- When using snap-shot backup reducing the size of the file-system containing NSF would make a lot of sense
- From I/O point of view on larger servers with a lot of FT data this can also improve performance

This setting does only make sense for larger environments

To migrate your FT index to a separate drive you need the following steps:

- Set the notes.ini FTBasePath=d:\full_text
- Run updall -f to rebuild all FT indexes.

This will automatically delete the old FT index and re-create it on the new drive.

-- Daniel

Comments

1Paul Mooney  04.10.2011 14:20:22  Full Text Index on separate Drive

I remember asking for this in 2007 at Lotusphere. This feature is already pushing one major customer of ours to upgrade.

2wDaniel Nashed  04.10.2011 15:14:00  Full Text Index on separate Drive

We have one customer moving from Groupwise to Notes with 6 TB of data. They require to have all mailfiles FT index.

And we had to wait for 8.5.3 to start because it would not have been possible to get it working properly -- even with 4 clusters and 8 partitions.

I have this on my list for a very long time too since many Lotuspheres and I also asked to have NIF in a seperate container ... that is the next functionality we might expect in a future release :-)

3Christian Henseler  04.10.2011 15:44:19  Full Text Index on separate Drive

Lotus Notes is obeying this parameter, too!

You can move FTs to local drives, while the dbs are located on a network share/homeshare, e.g. for Citrix XenApp installations

4Lyn  11.10.2011 15:31:10  Full Text Index on separate Drive

"And we had to wait for 8.5.3 to start because it would not have been possible to get it working properly"

Can you elaborate for me please? Thanks.

5Andrew Luder  13.10.2011 23:12:25  Full Text Index on separate Drive

Hi Daniel,

have you got a IBM URL reference to this new 853 feature. A customer I'm working for would like to see that's it's offiicially supported before implementing.

Assistance appreciated

Andrew

6Rob Novak  20.10.2011 19:46:29  Full Text Index on separate Drive

Sadly the companion product Quickr, which could arguably benefit from this most, is stuck on 8.5.1. :(

7Patrik Brunner  02.02.2012 17:14:40  Full Text Index on separate Drive

Cool parameter....

Just one thing:

you should also restart the indexer task after setting the notes.ini parameter... else the indexer creates the indexes again at the original location too (inside the data directory)...

Else it runs stable and fine.... I'm just wondering if someone has a 'formula' to calculate the space needed for fulltext indexes out of the database size...

Regards

Patrik

8Patrik Brunner  04.02.2012 12:52:13  Full Text Index on separate Drive

Additional hint:

Restart the server (only restarting indexer is not enough) after activating the Parameter to be sure that all processes know about it.

Reason: if you activate fulltext indexes via Domino Administrator (Files Tab), it's the server context (process: server) that creates the indexes... unfortunately this one doesn't pick up the parameter dynamically and needs a reboot.

Regards

Patrik

9Art Pufford  18.01.2013 1:23:58  Full Text Index on separate Drive

Are there any issues with moving FTE's in a iNotes environment. Client wants to make FTE available to all of their web mail users but they do not have the available space under their mail folder. Can iNotes browser clients still leverage the FTEs if they're moved? Thank you.....

10Art Pufford  18.01.2013 1:24:40  Full Text Index on separate Drive

Sorry.....FTI

11Bernd Webster  01.03.2015 23:57:03  Full Text Index on separate Drive

Will that work also for the Notes Client or only the Server?

Links

    Archives


    • [HCL Domino]
    • [Domino on Linux]
    • [Nash!Com]
    • [Daniel Nashed]