Monday, March 12, 2012

SharePoint 2007 - Master Merge

The concept of  Master merge and how indexing happens behind the scene in SharePoint

  • Index server when crawls the content it creates a shallow index, shallow index is a smaller part of our index file. The reason for creating Shallow index, we can write efficiently on a smaller file rather on a bigger file and also we can propagate the index file faster on the network to all query servers.
  • Reading all smaller index file will be time consuming, example when we server search query : "SharePoint" it would be a larger overhead to open all these smaller index file and perform search we need more file I/O. To prevent this overhead we perform merging of all these smaller files to a one single file called "Master Index" so that we can open a single file and perform search on the single index file. This process is called Master merge, merging all your shallow index to master index.
  • By default we don't have any time period to schedule Master merge, it happens when we have shallow index more than 10% size of master index
  • Master merge happens at query servers / index servers
  • We can force master merge or change the size limit below is the link written by Bill Baer (very interesting) http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/12/03/managing-master-merge-in-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007.aspx


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