About performance and capacity planning (Search Server 2008)

Applies To: Microsoft Search Server 2008

 

Topic Last Modified: 2008-09-11

The articles in this chapter will help you to determine the most appropriate hardware, topology and configuration requirements for a single Microsoft Search Server 2008 or Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express farm. The articles identify factors that can affect performance and capacity requirements, and provides recommendations for the following:

  • Number of server computers in the server farm.

  • Configuration of server roles in the server farm.

  • Hardware requirements for specific server roles in the server farm.

The capacity planning process should include a testing program for the characteristics specific to the environment. Because of the variety of factors that can affect performance and capacity in a given environment, testing is a crucial step in establishing the characteristics of the environment.

Planning for capacity vs. availability and redundancy

Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express are built on the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 platform. If you plan to use Search Server 2008 to host Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 sites as well as for Search functionality, you should also read the Plan for availability (Search Server 2008) and Plan for redundancy (Search Server 2008) articles to ensure that you start the capacity planning exercise with a topology that meets the organization's minimum availability and redundancy requirements. Given the topology you have determined you will deploy, these articles will help you decide whether you need to do the following:

  • Deploy Search Server 2008 or Search Server 2008 Express.

  • Add servers to meet goals for capacity and performance.

  • Adjust the configuration of server roles to optimize capacity and performance of the server farm.

  • Plan for more than one server farm based on capacity requirements.

In some cases, an organization's requirements for availability or redundancy can result in a server farm size that provides greater capacity or performance than is otherwise required. If this is the case, the capacity planning process can focus on sizing the server hardware economically, rather than on adding server computers or scaling up with higher-performing hardware.

In many cases, the topology that meets an organization's minimum availability and redundancy requirements is used as a starting point and server computers are added or scaled up to meet capacity and performance goals.

Performance and capacity planning process

There are many variables that can affect performance and capacity planning. Consequently, the most common answer to a performance- or capacity-related question begins with, "It depends."

The performance and capacity planning exercises provided in these topics are designed to reduce the number of variables in consideration so that straightforward answers can be provided based on common scenarios.

Performance and capacity planning focuses on the following three aspects of a solution:

  • Software boundaries   Each of the features that can be implemented and the objects that can be created have scale limitations. Planning for capacity boundaries ensures that the solution design fits within the scale recommendations of the software. Software boundaries and limits provided in this guide apply to all Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express environments.

    The article Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Search Server 2008 covers this area. Review the software boundaries and limits of the software against the solution design using the guidance in this article, and make adjustments to the design if they are necessary.

  • Throughput targets   Throughput is the number of operations per second that a server or server farm can process. Each kind of action that is performed by a server farm introduces a performance load on the server hardware. Primary actions include user operations, indexing content, and operations tasks (such as backing up the databases). The use of specific features also adds a performance load. Developing throughput targets involves estimating or calculating the number of operations per second that a server farm must process to support the expected throughput load.

    Guidance for establishing throughput targets and data capacity is provided for in Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Search Server 2008. Use the guidance in this article to determine the key performance and capacity characteristics for the environment, to estimate throughput and data capacity targets for the solution, and to evaluate targets against the performance of several sample topologies and sizes of hardware.

  • Data capacity   Data capacity includes the expected volume of content databases and the configuration database. Each server role also has unique data requirements based on the solution, such as disk space for content indexes or for cached content.

    Use the guidance in the article Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Search Server 2008 to determine your data capacity requirements.

After you have established a starting point topology, you can deploy a test environment based on the deployment plan. You can use the test tools that are provided in the article Tools for performance and capacity planning (Windows SharePoint Services) to establish actual performance and capacity data for the environment, and revise the deployment plan as required.

See Also

Concepts

Estimate performance and capacity requirements for Search Server 2008
Determine hardware and software requirements (Search Server 2008)
Plan for availability (Search Server 2008)
Plan for redundancy (Search Server 2008)

Other Resources

Plan for performance and capacity (Windows SharePoint Services)