Enterprise Search: ISYS SEARCH SOFTWARE

RESOURCE CONSUMPTION AND PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS

 

What Software Salespeople Can’t Tell You

If you’re looking to buy or upgrade a piece of software, you’re probably asking all sorts of questions, such as:

 

• Does the software perform the functions I want it to?
• Can I get adequate after-sales support?
• Is it within my company’s budget?
• How will it impact the resources that are already in place?

 

Most of these questions are easily answered – all a software company has to do is look at your business needs and match the right product. But the last question – ‘How will it impact the resources that are already in place?’ – is not such a simple one to answer.

 

How a piece of software impacts on your IT infrastructure depends on a lot of factors – some are foreseeable, some are not. You may know what the load on your network is now, and how many people will be using the software to start off with, but it can be very difficult to predict how things will happen in the future. How will your network expand? Will you employ more people? What other software will the company use? What processes will be running on different machines? How will your users’ habits change?

For example, some companies that invest in setting up an intranet will spend time and money designing it, implementing it and training staff to use it, only to find that an initial boom of interest wanes in short time. On the other hand, a new piece of software that is used initially by a handful of people may quickly be in high demand when word gets out that it is easy to use and increases productivity.

This paper aims to put some concerns to rest about how ISYS Search Software consumes resources in a typical environment. We can’t predict what your company will do tomorrow, but we can certainly give you an idea of how ISYS can fit almost seamlessly into your established environment.

 

ISYS and Your CPU

The amount of CPU that ISYS uses depends on which of the ISYS products you are using and what functions you are performing.

Indexing

When indexing your documents, CPU usage can be as low as 2 percent during the scanning stage (when ISYS is looking for new, changed and deleted documents to index), and as high as 90 percent during the document reading stage (when ISYS is extracting each word from your documents and adding them to your index) in extreme cases. An ‘extreme’ case may involve large, complex documents using RichHTML. Whatever your case, ISYS will not use CPU that is required by other priority tasks. ISYS will only use as much CPU as your operating system can spare at the time.

Querying

Querying an index takes up very little of your CPU. Likewise, if you’re using the ISYS:web server, CPU usage is minimal.

 

In Conclusion…

Many people in the market for a search tool assume that a product with the capabilities of ISYS must consume resources at a great rate. The fact is, in the large majority of cases, little or no adjustment to a company’s IT infrastructure has to be made to accommodate ISYS. Some companies will stock up on memory and new machines in preparation for the installation of a new software or server system, when it’s not really necessary to do so. The best practice with ISYS is to start with what you’ve got. As long as you meet the minimum requirements for installation, chances are that ISYS will meet your needs without having to spend extra money, time and effort.
For optimum performance and efficiency, we recommend the following:

• Store your indexes on the same machine as your ISYS software. This will improve the performance of indexing and updating.
• Take the time to customize ISYS for your needs. ISYS provides many options for indexing, querying and viewing your files – use them to your best advantage. For example, keep your Common Words List up to date; customize your Significant and Insignificant characters lists; and use draft view presentation if WYSIWYG isn’t necessary.
• Update indexes regularly to remove old data and maximize the accuracy of your search results.

 

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