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3.1 Choosing an appropriate server machine

 

A good machine for a typical Harvest application will have a reasonably fast processor (e.g., Sun Sparc 5 or a DEC Alpha), 1-2 GB of disk, and 64 MB of RAM. A slower CPU (e.g., a Sun 4) will work, although queries will be somewhat slow. More important than CPU speed, however, is memory size. Harvest uses a number of process, some of which provide needed ``plumbing'' (e.g., BrokerQuery.pl), and some of which improve performance (e.g., the Object Cache and its parallel dnsserver processes, and the glimpseserver process). If you do not have enough memory, your system will page a lot, and drastically impact performance. The other factor affecting RAM usage is how much data you are trying to index. The more data, the more disk I/O will be performed at query time, and hence the more RAM it will take to provide a reasonable sized disk buffer pool.

More details about sizing your RAM requirements are provided at the end of Section 5.11.

The amount of disk you need will depend on how much data you want to index in a single Broker. (It is possible to distribute your index over multiple Brokers if it gets too large for one disk.) A good rule of thumb is that you will need about 10% as much disk to hold the Gatherer and Broker databases as the total size of the data you want to index. The actual space needs will vary depending on the type of data you are indexing. For example, PostScript achieves a much higher indexing space reduction than HTML, because so much of the PostScript data (such as page positioning information) is discarded when building the index.

You will need another 30-50 MB of disk space to run a Harvest Object Cache, or more if you want to run a widely shared cache (e.g., a company-wide ``root'' cache, under which there a number of subordinate caches).

       


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Next: Supported platforms; software Up: 3 Getting and Running Previous: 3 Getting and Running



Darren Hardy
Mon Apr 3 15:22:37 MDT 1995