Scheduled Indexing Overview and Examples

Indexing can be a resource-intensive process; in some cases, especially with high-load repositories, users may experience lower performance during indexing. If that is the case, you may wish to schedule your indexing to exclude certain peak business hours . For example, if most of your employees access the repository between 7am and 7pm, you could schedule indexing to run only at other times. You can do this by creating an XML file that the Laserfiche Full-Text Search Service will use to determine when to pause indexing and when to resume it.

Note that, while indexing is paused, changes to the repository will not be reflected in the search index catalog.  For example, if you add a new document to the repository and OCR it, but your indexing is paused until 7pm, the document will not be indexed until after 7pm, and will therefore not be retrievable through full-text search until that time.

Scheduled indexing is overridden by manual changes to indexing. If you manually start the indexing process in the Administration Console, indexing will begin, regardless of the index schedule.

To create an index schedule

  1. In your preferred text or XML editor, create a file named QuietPeriods.xml and save it to the Search folder for your repository, in the repository directory. If such a file already exists, open it in your preferred text or XML editor.

    2. Important: No other files in the Search folder should ever be opened or modified by hand. Only make changes to the QuietPeriods.xml file.

  2. Paste the following into the XML file.

    3. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

    <LFFTS>

    <Catalog>

    <Period>DayCodeStop,TimeStop-DayCodeStart,TimeStart</Period>

    </Catalog>

    </LFFTS>

  3. Replace DayCodeStop with the numeric value of the day of the week for which you want to configure an index pause (see below for the list of day codes), TimeStop with the time the indexing should be paused (as 24-hour time in the format HH:MM), DayCodeStart with the numeric value of the day you want the indexing to begin again, and TimeStart with the time you want indexing to begin again.

    4. Example: The following code would stop indexing at 7am on Monday and begin it again at 7:30pm on Monday:

    <Period>1,7:00-1,19:30</Period>

    Note: Be aware that you are configuring the time period for which indexing will be paused. Indexing will occur normally at all other times.

  4. Add new <Period> lines for each day you want to configure by copying the line, pasting it below the existing line, and modifying the day code and time period for each new line. For example, to add paused periods for Tuesdays and Thursdays, you would need two lines.
  5. When you have configured all the time periods for which you want indexing to be paused, save the file.
  6. Restart the Laserfiche Full-Text Search Service.

The numeric day code is an integer representing a day of the week: 0 for Sunday, 1 for Monday, and so on, through 6 for Saturday. (The value 7 can also be used for Sunday.)

Note that the Laserfiche Full-Text Search Service will interpret time periods literally -- for instance, a time period of 1,12:00-1,6:00 will stop indexing on noon Monday and start it again at 6am on the next Monday, because the time format uses 24-hour time. In addition, invalid time periods (such as duplicated periods, periods within other periods, and periods where the start and stop day and time are the same), will result in the schedule failing. An error message will be logged to the Event Viewer in that case.

Scheduled Indexing Examples

The following examples demonstrate several different ways to use scheduled indexing.

You might decide to pause indexing for your average employee's workday -- 8:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday -- but permit indexing at all other times (that is, the evening, early morning, and weekends. To do so, you would use the following schedule:

<LFFTS>

<Catalog>

<Period>1,8:00-1,17:00</Period>

<Period>2,8:00-2,17:00</Period>

<Period>3,8:00-3,17:00</Period>

<Period>4,8:00-4,17:00</Period>

<Period>5,8:00-5,17:00</Period>

</Catalog>

</LFFTS>

Alternately, you might not want to pause indexing for nine hours a day. Instead, you might pause indexing from 8:00am to 12:30pm, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, when your scanner operators perform their bulk scanning and the repository is under particularly heavy load, but permit indexing in the afternoon and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as during the evening and on weekends. In that case, you might set up a schedule like the following:

<LFFTS>

<Catalog>

<Period>1,8:00-1,12:30</Period>

<Period>3,8:00-3,12:30</Period>

<Period>5,8:00-5,12:30</Period>

</Catalog>

</LFFTS>