Office Server Search Archival Plugin Test

The Search feature of the MOSS 2007 not only makes it possible to search through content, documents, and people within the SharePoint sites, but also through external sources such as Windows file shares, public Microsoft Exchange server folders, and standard web sites. This is what makes MOSS 2007 that much more valuable to users.

The Archival and Schema plugins are internal components of the MOSS Search engine, typically responsible for processing the metadata of indexed documents. By monitoring these components, administrators can efficiently evaluate how well the MOSS search feature is functioning, identify irregularities early, and fine-tune the MOSS server to ensure peak performance of the search engine.

The Office Server Search Archival Plugin test focuses on the archival plugin component, and helps assess its processing ability.

Target of the test : A Microsoft SharePoint Server

Agent deploying the test : An internal agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results each for the ProfileImport and Portal_Content instances

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameters	Description
Test period	This indicates how often should the test be executed.
Host	The host for which the test is to be configured.
Port	The port at which the host server listens.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Active documents in first queue	Indicates the number of documents that are actively using the first queue of the plugin.	Number	One of the more difficult tasks that a Search admin faces is figuring out how to build out the myriad of crawl schedules needed to keep the content on the SharePoint server freshly indexed. When you are building out these schedules you will want to keep a close eye on the system and slowly add new schedules to minimize starving the crawl of resources while maxing out the utilization of the crawler. Starvation for Enterprise Search is defined as the crawlers inability to allocate another thread to retrieve the next document in the queue of work. This can be caused by resource (I/O) contention on the SQL machine, too many hosts concurrently participating in the crawl, "hungry" hosts that do not quickly relinquish a thread and finally back-ups (since crawls are paused during this time). The values of these measures typically help determine whether the crawler is in a starved state or not. If they are both consistently at 500 for the Portal_Content instance or 50 for the ProfileImport instance, then you are in a starved state and you are likely to be bottle-necked in SQL for I/O on the Crawl DB drive. Look into tuning SQL for better I/O.
Active documents in second queue	Indicates the number of documents actively using the second queue of the plugin.	Number
Error documents	Indicates the number of documents which currently returned errors from the plugin.	Number	Ideally, this value should be low.
Bulk insert sessions	Indicates the number of active bulk insert sessions to the database server.	Number
Active queue length	Indicates the number of documents currently available in the active queue.	Number
Blocked documents	Indicates the number of documents currently waiting for a queue.	Number