Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

244 Part III: Planning and Deployment
Advantages of Adding an Index Server Adding an index server provides the following
advantages:
■ It gives you the ability to crawl more content more quickly.
■ It enables you to separate your content indexes onto separate index servers
based on your customer’s specific indexing requirements. For example, you
can separate internal content indexes from external content indexes.
■ It enables you to use a separate index server for crawling specific content
sources that require much more frequent indexing than other content sources.
Dedicated Windows SharePoint Services Server Farm
Monitor the Internet Information Services (IIS) logs to determine the amount of traffic
going to the Windows SharePoint Services sites in the server farm. If you discover
a large amount of traffic going to one or more Windows SharePoint Services sites,
consider moving the busy sites to a dedicated Windows SharePoint Services server
farm. If you see trends from ongoing monitoring that indicate your Windows Share-
Point Services site traffic is increasing and will continue to increase, a separate dedicated
Windows SharePoint Services site might be the best scaling option. You can
elect to move one or more—or all—of the busiest Windows SharePoint Services site
collections to a separate, dedicated Windows SharePoint Services server farm.
Separating one or more Windows SharePoint Services site collections to a dedicated
server farm frees up resources on the front-end Web servers that are dedicated
to supporting the corporate and divisional portals. It also enables you to
independently scale out the dedicated Windows SharePoint Services server farm.
Microsoft SQL Server
Logs
The percent processor time counter is the leading indicator for Microsoft SQL Server
performance. Examine percent processor time in conjunction with overall memory
capacity, network traffic, and input/output (I/O) subsystem capacity.
Monitoring system performance in conjunction with IIS logs and SharePoint Portal
Server Usage Analysis logs provides more in-depth information about how your sites
are being used. Windows Server 2003 System Monitor helps you to understand
resource consumption on a per-server basis. The logs provide in-depth Web traffic
analysis data, such as which sites are most heavily used and by whom, how many
visitors use the sites, and peak periods of activity.