Checking Indexing Status

Now that you have set up your site for indexing, you can check status. There are two ways to check indexing status:

Windows NT Performance Monitor Method

Windows NT Performance Monitor can verify the indexing process for you. Index Server installs a number of performance counters to monitor the state of Index Server.

  1. From the Taskbar, click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and click Performance Monitor.
  2. From the View menu, click Report.
  3. From the Edit menu, click Add To Report.
  4. In the Object list box, click Content Index.
  5. In the Counter list box, select all the counters, and click the Add button.
  6. The counters are added to the report.

  7. Click Done.

The performance monitor now displays indexing status. The following list explains each counter:

# of documents filtered
Indicates the number of documents that have been indexed by the system.

Files to be filtered
Indicates the number of files that have been created or changed and still need to be filtered. These counters should be changing as you watch. As files are being copied to the Web server, the Files to be filtered number should increase. As they are indexed, it should decrease and the # documents filtered should increase. When indexing is up to date, Files to be filtered will equal zero. The files may not be indexed right away because the server is busy copying files. Indexing files is a background process with a lower priority than most standard server operations. This is done to limit the impact Index Server may have on the Web server.

Index size
Indicates the disk space in megabytes consumed by the indexes. This number may not increase right away. It is updated only periodically as the indexes are optimized. This counter does not include the size of the .prp file.

Merge progress
Indicates whether index optimization is taking place and shows its progress during optimization. A reading of 100 means that merging is complete and is not taking place.

Persistent indexes
Shows you how many indexes are stored on the disk. The optimal number is one. As indexing proceeds, the system may create several persistent indexes. Periodically, these indexes are merged together to optimize system performance.

Running queries
Shows how many concurrent queries are being processed by the server. If you are actively querying the server, this number will change.

Total # of documents
Indicates how many objects have been detected on the volume and have been indexed by the system. This number will grow as files are copied.

Unique keys
Indicates how many unique words are represented in the indexes. This number is not updated until the first merge has taken place.

Wordlists
Indicates how many temporary word lists have been created. As objects are indexed, the system creates word lists. When a certain number of word lists have been created (between 14 and 20, depending on the computer’s RAM), they are merged into a persistent index and cleared from memory. When a certain number of persistent indexes have been created, they are merged into a single persistent index, the master index.

Web Browser Method

Index Server can publish its indexing status on the World Wide Web. Index Server does this through a special query generated by the Index Server Manager (HTML) page. This query lets any computer with a Web browser check the status of Index Server.

  1. From the Taskbar, click Start, point to Programs, point to Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, point to Microsoft Index Server, and click Index Server Manager (HTML).
  2. Your computer’s browser should display the Index Server Manager (HTML) page.

  3. In the middle of the list, locate Index Statistics, and click the corresponding Start button.
  4. Index Server checks its performance counters, and returns the values, formatted as a Web page.

The returned Web page shows more information than the performance monitor in the Windows NT Performance Monitor method because a number of performance counters were not added to the chart in Performance Monitor. For a full list and description of the performance counters, see Monitoring Performance.

If you scroll to the bottom of the statistics page, you will find two buttons:

Refresh Page
Displays the latest performance values. Wait a few seconds, and then click the Refresh Page button to generate a new page with the latest values.

Force master merge
Optimizes the indexes by merging them together into a single master index.


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