Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Saving Gatherer Logs
Chapter 21: The Architecture of the Gatherer 603
Administrators can save old versions of the gatherer log for statistical purposes such
as trend analysis or even to to debug problems with index restrictions. By changing
property settings of a gatherer log on the SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration
page, an administrator can view log entries from previous crawls. The other
alternative is to pull the logs directly from SQL Server using active data objects
(ADO). The logs are named gathererlog_ID#, where ID# is a number between one
and four according to the action that was logged. Table 21-4 shows the ID# that corresponds
to the action that was logged.
Table 21-4 Log Numbers and Corresponding Action
Number Action Logged
1 Portal content
2 Nonportal content
3 Auto Categorization training
4 Profile import
Index Propagation
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 allows the indexing process and the process of querying
indexes to be performed on physically separate servers. A server dedicated to
performing the indexing process is called the index management server, while a
server dedicated to processing client search queries is called the search server. This
allows SharePoint Portal Server to create extensive indexes without affecting the
performance of the search server. Once the index management server completes the
indexing process, the index is propagated to the search server so that queries can be
processed locally.
Preparing for Propagation of an Index
By default, propagation occurs automatically after an index management server creates
or updates a content index by using any type of update. Propagation occurs
only if your Index Server and Search Server roles are assigned to different servers in
the farm. If both roles are assigned to the same server in the farm, there is no index
propagation. If needed, propagation can also be forced on the SharePoint Portal
Server Central Administration page.
A manual propagation is needed if indexing is paused or propagation fails for
some reason, such as network problems or lack of disk space on the search server.
Another reason to force a manual propagation is when a new search server is added
to the server farm.