Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

618 Part VII: Information Management in SharePoint Products and Technologies
mind that if you reset the index, you’ll be starting simultaneous, full-index updates
on each content source that writes to that index file. If you have a high number of
content sources writing to that index file, it is possible to overload your server with
the execution of multiple full-update builds to rebuild the content in that index file.
Fourth, if you’re running in a server farm environment where the indexes are
created on an Index server and then propagated to a Search server, bear in mind that
the larger the index file, the longer the copy operation will last between the Index
server and the Search server. When the Index server is crawling a content source,
that information is being written to the local copy of the index on the Index server.
Only after the crawling operations are completed will the index file be copied from
the Index server to the Search server. Because this is a normal file copy operation,
the larger the file, the more time that will be required to copy this file from the Index
server to the Search server. Depending on available bandwidth between servers, this
could end up being an hour or more of copy time between servers for extremely
large index files. For the portal site content incremental update that occurs every 10
minutes, this could mean that your copy operations do not finish before the next
incremental crawl commences. A best practice is to perform a test copy of the largest
index file to discern the amount of time required to copy a file from the Index server
to the Search server and then verify that the copy time is within acceptable limits.
If you need to create a new index file, perform these steps:
1. On the Configure Search And Indexing page, in the Content Indexes section,
click Manage content indexes.
2. On the Manage Content Indexes page, click New Content Index.
3. On the Create Content Index page, in the Name and Information section,
perform the following: type a unique name for this index in the Name box.
The name must be unique for this portal site. The description is not required to
be filled in and is there for your purposes.
4. In the Source Group box, type the source group name. This name should be
thought out in advance of creating the index file because source groups play a
pivotal role in the creation of search scopes.
5. In the Server list, select the server on which the index will reside.
6. Click OK.
Tip Universal Naming Convention (UNC) names are not accepted here.
The address must be a valid file system path for the server on which the
index is being created.