MARKLOGIC SERVER

LOW-LEVEL SYSTEM CONTROL
When scaling a system, there are a few administrative settings you can adjust that
control how MarkLogic operates and can, if used judiciously, improve your loading and
query performance.
1. "Last Modified" and "Directory Last Modified" options: These options
track the last modified time of each document and each directory by updating
its property sheet after each change. This is convenient information to have, but
it incurs an extra fragment write for every document update. Turning off these
options saves that bit of work. Starting with MarkLogic 7, these options are disabled
by default, but in earlier versions and in systems upgraded from earlier versions they
will likely be enabled.
2. "Directory Creation" option: When set to "automatic," MarkLogic creates
directory entries automatically, so if you create a document with the path /x/y/z.
xml, MarkLogic will create the directory entries for /x/ and /x/y/ if they don't
already exist. When it's set to "manual," you have to create those directories
yourself if you want them to exist. Directories are important when accessing a
database via WebDAV, where the database has to look and behave like a filesystem,
and they're important if you're doing directory-based queries, but they otherwise
aren't necessary. Setting directory creation to "manual" saves the ingestion overhead
of checking if the directories mentioned in the path already exist and the work
of creating them if they don't. This option is by default disabled starting with
MarkLogic 7.
3. "Locking" options: MarkLogic's locking strategy ensures that documents in a
database have distinct URIs as they are ingested. What setting you need depends
on your database's assignment policy, described in the "Rebalancing" section. The
default bucket and legacy policies require "fast" locking, which means only the
URIs for existing documents are checked for uniqueness. The statistical and range
policies require "strict" locking, which checks the URIs for both new and existing
documents. If you're absolutely certain that all of the documents you're loading
have distinct URIs, as often happens with a bulk load, you can relax this restriction
and set locking to "off."
4. "Journaling" option: MarkLogic supports three journaling options. The "strict"
option considers a transaction committed only after it's been journaled and the
journal has been fully flushed to disk. This protects against MarkLogic Server
process failures, host operating system kernel failures, and host hardware failures.
This option is always used with forests configured for Shared-Disk Failover. The
"fast" option considers a transaction committed after it's been journaled, but the
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