Skip to main content

ATG Search - performance decisions in Enterprise search

Read more about the basic design decisions for a commerce search setup @ http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/03/basic-design-decisions-for-commerce.html

Read more about search engine tuning @ http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/02/atg-search-search-engine-tuning.html

Following items will affect search performance:  number of items to be searched, quantity of content for each item, number of meta tags, number of facets, Search Merchandising settings, constraints, number of returned results,... You could find a detailed analysis below :

1. Decide how many search engines you need : Based on the performance requirement of the ecommerce site, create the Search Project @ BCC - Search Admin and add the search engine hosts. Read more about search project creation and search engine host set up @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.com/2012/01/atg-search-how-to-create-search-project.html.

2. Decide the search indexing properties : Search indexing time and search response time are dependent on the index file size. As part of verification process, the irrelevant attributes from search index definition file should be removed. As a result, users will view relevant results with less number of attributes and also will get improvements in search indexing time.

3. Decide how many search projects you need : If your application is a multi locale application, you could create multiple search project for each locale. This will give you more options for each locale and a separate search engine can support a locale. Read more about search project creation @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.com/2012/01/atg-search-how-to-create-search-project.html.

4. Decide whether you need to do parallel search indexing : If you have multiple search projects, you could do parallel search indexing and improve search indexing performnace.

5. One search engine per box : Search engines should always run on their own machine, with no other applications running.  This is critical for machines responding to search queries to ensure proper and consistent user experience.

6. Indexing engine box : The search engine used for indexing should not be run on the same server as an engine used for query response.  The search engine used for indexing is preferred to be run on its own machine (with no other applications), but can be run on the CA/BCC.  If this is done, the CA machines should be deployed with extra power (CPU speed and cores, RAM) so that indexing does not affect BCC user experience.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

JBoss - know more about the JBoss directory structure

Fundamentally, the JBoss architecture consists of the JMX MBean server, the microkernel, and a set of pluggable component services - the MBeans. The JBoss Application Server ships with three different server configurations. Within the <JBoss_Home>/server directory, you will find three subdirectories: minimal, default and all. The default configuration is the one used if you don’t specify another one when starting up the server. If you want to know which services are configured in each of these instances, look at the jboss-service.xml file in the <JBoss_Home>/server/<instance-name>/conf/ directory and also the configuration files in the <JBoss_Home>/server/<instance-name>/deploy directory. JBoss 4.0 features an embedded Apache Tomcat 5.5 servlet container. conf --> The conf directory contains the jboss-service.xml bootstrap descriptor file for a given server configuration. This has the jboss-log4j.xml file which configures the Apach...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to simulate Browser back button

When someone asks how to simulate a back button, they really mean to ask how to create a link that points to the previously visited page. Most browsers tend to keep a list of which websites the user has visited and in what order they have done so. The DOM window object provides access to the browser's history through the history object. Moving backward and forward through the user's history is done using the   back(), forward(), and go() methods of the  history  object. To move backward through history, just do window.history.back() ; This will act exactly like the user clicked on the Back button in their browser toolbar. Find below a sample html code: <html> <head> <script type="text/javascript"> function goBack(){  window.history.back() } </script> </head> <body>    <input type="button" value="Back" onclick="goBack()" /> </body> </html>
Post a Comment
Read more

CamStudio - to capture your screen activity into video (Screen casting free software)

CamStudio is a tool (open source) for recording screen activity into standard AVI video files (screen casting software). It also have the audio record feature. It can also used to convert AVIs into Flash Video format. Read more about screencast @  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast . You can download CamStudio from:   http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/    or   http://camstudio.org/  . I have uploaded a demo video, recorded using the Camstudio release 2.6. You could watch a high quality  video @ Youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-6aHFcuUM or you could find a video with low resolution below : CamStudio can be used to: Create movies used in user trainings Demonstrate features of a new software Track the progress of a program that executes for a long time Record the sequence of steps that cause the occurrence of bugs in a faulty software Record a movie stream  Convert AVI files to Flash (...
Post a Comment
Read more

How can we use SOAP UI to test ATG search

The call from the ATG commerce instance ( Estore instance ) to the search engine is done using the SOAP protocol. Read more about this architecture @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.com/2011/11/atg-search-architectural-flow-search.html . If you have a SOAP UI tool (get it from @  http://www.soapui.org/ ), you could test the request/response from the search engine. You could find the wsdl for this SOAP in the folder in which your ATG search engine is installed. Below screen shot has the deatils of the wsdl : To call the search engine you need to know the port in which the search engine is running. You could get it from the SearchEngineService component of the commerce instance @ /dyn/admin/nucleus/atg/search/routing/SearchEngineService/.  Once you have these details, you could call the search engine with a sample request and a query string to get the response.
Post a Comment
Read more

ATG Search and how to generate XHTMLs from STG file

The ATG search  indexing will give you the idx and stg files. When I analyse the stg files with some text editors like Textpad or Ultraedit , found some <html> and </html> tags and the contents inside these tags seems to be the same content of the temporary XHTML files , which will be generated during the search indexing for each indexed item. So I deicded to take the contents in between the <html> and </html> tags and save as XHTML file and it works for almost all indexed items. As you might know, these XHTML file’s <head> tag contains all the meta properties ( refine properties ) and the <body> tag have the text properties ( searchable properties ) for each indexed item. Please note that the above steps are not an ATG recommended method to generate the XHTML files. I come across to this simple method to form the XHTML files and I am not 100% sure that this will give all the XHTML files of a search index . But I found this to be very useful f...
Post a Comment
Read more