Indexing and configuring search after the upgrade

To use the new search engine, reindexing and possible some new configuration is required.

About this task

If you are upgrading from a release before SDL Tridion 2011, then after you have upgraded, you must create a new index for the new search engine. If you expect to index items containing more than 10,000 words, you must also configure your maximum item size (and possibly the amount of memory allocated by the search engine).

Also, the new Lucene-based search engine, may result in different search results to your search queries than the old search engine. Specifically, operator precedence (in search queries such as a AND b OR c) is different in Lucene than in the old Verity search engine. You can work around the problem by using brackets to indicate precedence.

Procedure

  1. To create your search index, open a command prompt and access the bin\ subfolder of your Content Manager server root location (defaults to either c:\Program Files\Tridion or c:\Program Files (x86)\Tridion).
  2. In this location, run the executable TcmReIndex.exe.
    The tool creates a new search index.
  3. Next, ask yourself if you know or expect that some of your Content Manager items will contain more than 10,000 words (equivalent to about 14 single-spaced pages of 11-point text), and if you want to have them indexed by the search engine. This also applies to words in binary documents, such as PDF files.
  4. If the answer to this question is yes, then open the file solrconfig.xml, located in the solr-home\tridion\conf subfolder of the Content Manager server root location, in a plain-text or XML editor.
  5. Find the element called <maxFieldLength>, change its value to the maximum number of words you expect the search engine to have to index, and save and close the solrconfig.xml file.

    The number you specify is itself bound by available memory (which by default is set to 1 GB). That is, if you specify a very large number here and actually try to index a content item with that many words, a memory exception may still occur. If you expect the default 1 GB to be too small, you can allocate more memory to the search engine as follows:

    • Access the subfolder bin\ of the Content Manager root location.
    • In this folder, open the file TcmSearchHost.exe.config in a plain-text or XML editor.
    • Find the solrHost element. This element has an attribute called jvmArguments which contains a large number of settings.
    • Inside this string, find a setting called jvmOptions, which has a value that starts with -Xmx1024M.
    • Change 1024M (that is, 1024 MB or 1 GB) to a memory value you expect to be sufficient for the <maxFieldLength> value specified earlier.
    • Save and close TcmSearchHost.exe.config.
  6. Next, restart the Tridion Content Manager Search Host Windows service as above.