Blog Entry

For the last few weeks (since the Wednesday of Brainshare in fact) I have been working on an issue that has been very quickfinder intensive. Quickfinder, for those that don't know, is the process that runs in the POA that indexes all the mail and documents so that searches perform more quickly. In fact, a DMS system is handicapped without quickfinder as no searches will complete.

Watching a POA index a post office is a little hypnotic, along the same lines as a bad B movie or, dare I say it, American Idol - you find yourself just sitting and staring at the thing when there are loads better things you can be doing - but these switches make the pain a little more bearable.

/qfnousers - Skips indexing of user databases, so each run will only index the libraries in the post office

/qfnopreproc - Skips the preprocessing, though if you are indexing libraries you probably don't want to add this switch

/qfnolibs - Skips libraries - very useful if you only want to index the users

/qflevel=n:

0 indexes 1000 items at a time

1 indexes 500 items on a low priority thread, and skips if less than 3 new items

2 indexes 1000 items on a medium priority thread and does all items

3 indexes 2000 items on a high priority thread and does all items

99 indexes 11000 items at a time on a high priority thread - this is the one that I use the most, as it means that the indexing will be done in the least amount of time.

/qfdeleteold - Deletes the old indexes and starts a complete reindex

/qfuserfidbeg=

/qfuserfidend=

These last two go hand in hand - you specify the start and end FID that you want to index - this is great if you only want to index a single user. TIDs say that you need to specify the FID in reverse, but that's not true. My FID is DA0, so if I wanted to index only my database I would specify DA0 on both switches.

When the QF index is running you will see a database name and a number in parentheses, eg USERDAO.DB (14563). This number is the number of items in the database left to index, so on qflevel 2 it would take 15 complete QF runs to complete and, depending on your QF settings this can take over 2 weeks. With qflevel 99, it would be done in 2 runs, or 2 days with the same settings that you may already have. The more times that qf runs per day the quicker this whole process will complete.

What I do when working on qf problems is create a seperate POA instance with it's own startup file and add the relevent qf switches in it - this means that I can start and stop that POA without impacting users.