Best practices for Search Server 2010

1. Plan the deployment

• Plan the search topology and plan for capacity and performance. You must plan an appropriate topology for enterprise search to provide an optimal search experience. For information about how to plan a search topology, see Planen der Topologie für die Unternehmenssuche (Search Server 2010). For information about capacity planning for SharePoint Server 2010 search, see Schätzen der Leistungs- und Kapazitätsanforderungen für die SharePoint Server 2010-Suche. For information about SharePoint Server 2010, see Leistungs- und Kapazitätsverwaltung (SharePoint Server 2010).

• Plan for findability. For a search technology to be useful, users must be able to easily find what they are looking for. For a good discussion of findability, see Organizing Information in SharePoint Server 2010 (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=226827) by Microsoft MVP Bill English.

• Use managed properties and scopes to enhance the end-user search experience. Managed properties enable search administrators to create a one-to-many mapping of related properties to help users refine their search queries. For example, a search administrator can map crawled properties named "writer" and "author2" to the managed property "author" so that users who include the "author" property in their query also get search results for "writer" and "author2." For more information about managed properties, see Planen von Metadateneigenschaften für die Suche (Search Server 2010). You can help users refine their search queries by using search scopes, which limit searches to a content subset, such as a specific site. For more information, see Planen von Suchbereichen (Search Server 2010). If you use custom queries, make sure that the appropriate properties are set to be used in scopes. For more information, see Verwalten von Metadateneigenschaften (Search Server 2010)

• Plan for IFilters .The crawler uses IFilters to read individual file types when it crawls content. If you are currently using 32-bit IFilters in a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 farm, you must obtain 64-bit IFilters from the appropriate vendor for Search Server 2010. For information about the 64-bit IFilters that are included in Search Server 2010 by default, see Dateitypen und IFilters (Referenz) (Search Server 2010).

• Create service level agreements. Ensure that service level agreements (SLAs) for content crawls are agreed to before deployment. For information about how to plan content crawls, see Planen der Durchforstung und der Sammelsuche (Search Server 2010).

2. Start with a well-configured infrastructure

• Deploy two or more query components and crawl components for redundancy and increased availability. For more information, see Search architectures for SharePoint Server 2010: Model. Increasing the number of query components and crawl components can improve performance. For more information, see Schätzen der Leistungs- und Kapazitätsanforderungen für die SharePoint Server 2010-Suche.

• Use at least two database servers to host the content databases and the databases for the Search service application (including crawl, property, and administrative databases). For more database recommendations, see Speicher- und SQL Server-Kapazitätsplanung und -Konfiguration (SharePoint Server 2010) and Bewährte Methoden für SQL Server 2008 in einer SharePoint Server 2010-Farm.

• Use a gigabit network for intra-farm connections.

3. Manage access by using Windows security groups or by using role claims for forms-based authentication or authentication using a Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) security token

We recommend that you add users to Windows security groups or role claims instead of adding users to SharePoint groups for the following reasons:

• Because changes to Windows security groups do not directly affect the access control entries (ACEs) on SharePoint sites, you do not have to perform a new crawl when user accounts within those Windows security groups are changed.

• During the indexing process, the system stores the ACE of each user who was added to a SharePoint group instead of the ACE of the SharePoint group itself. This process supports approximately 1000 users per access control list (ACL), after which the "Parameter is incorrect" error causes crawling to fail.

For more information, see Auswählen der Sicherheitsgruppen (SharePoint Server 2010) and Konfigurieren der Forderungsauthentifizierung (SharePoint Server 2010).

4. Defragment the search database

The search database contains metadata and ACLs of crawled content. Over a series of crawls, the search database can become fragmented. To improve performance of crawls and queries, periodically defragment the search database. For more information, see Datenbankwartung für SharePoint Server 2010.

5. Monitor SQL Server latency

Search is I/O intensive for SQL Server. For best search performance, we recommend that you follow the guidance for small, medium, and large farms that is provided in Schätzen der Leistungs- und Kapazitätsanforderungen für Microsoft Search Server 2010 Express (Whitepaper).

6. Test the crawling and querying subsystems after you change any configuration or apply updates

We recommend that you test the crawling and querying functionality of the server farm after you make configuration changes or apply updates. An easy way to do this is to create a temporary content source that is used only for this purpose. To test, we recommend that you crawl ten items — for example .txt files on a file share — and then perform search queries for those files. Make sure that the test items are currently not in the index. It is helpful if they contain unique words that will be displayed at the top of the search results page when queried. After the test is complete, we recommend that you delete the content source that you created for this test. Doing this removes the items that you crawled from the index and those test items will not appear in search results after you are finished testing. For information about crawling content, see Planen der Durchforstung und der Sammelsuche (Search Server 2010) and Verwalten der Durchforstung (Search Server 2010).

7. Review the antivirus policy

When you use certain file-level antivirus software programs in Search Server 2010, you should exclude certain folders from being scanned. If you do not exclude these folders, you can experience many unexpected issues. For more information, see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 952167: Certain folders may have to be excluded from antivirus scanning when you use a file-level antivirus program in SharePoint (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=123963).

Acknowledgements

The SharePoint Server 2010 Content Publishing team thanks the following contributors to this article:

• Luca Bandinelli, Microsoft SharePoint Customer Advisory Team

• Dan Blood, Microsoft SharePoint Customer Advisory Team

• Sid Shah, Microsoft SharePoint Search Product Team

• James Sturms, Microsoft SharePoint Search Product Team