Measurable gains from implementing FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

 

Applies to: Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

This is the seventh of 12 articles that compose How Microsoft IT deployed FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (white paper).

The new FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint search solution immediately provided measurable gains in many areas, such as those shown in tables 1, 2, and 3.

Table 1 shows how the scale of the Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint solution is much greater than the scale of the search solution that the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Redmond SSP provided.

Table 1. Scale comparison

Characteristic SharePoint Server 2007 solution (approximate, 2009) FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint solution (approximate, August 2011)

Amount of content crawled on sites hosted by MSIT

13 terabytes

34.5 terabytes

Number of sites and subsites crawled

350,000

683,050

Number of items in content index

43 million

90 million

Size of content index

300 gigabytes (GB)

6 terabytes

Database sizes

  • Redmond SSP search database: 340 GB

  • Redmond SSP profiles database: 70 GB

  • Crawl database 1: 427.3 GB

  • Crawl database 2: 237.1 GB

  • People crawl database: 17.3 GB

  • Search administration database: 2.15 GB

  • Content (FAST connector) property database: 0.19 GB

  • People (SharePoint connector) property database: 5.42 GB

Query volume per month

500,000

5.45 million

Query volume per second

.1929

2.033

Table 2 shows how much SharePoint content MSIT hosted for each region, and that the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint solution crawled, as of August 2011.

Table 2. SharePoint content crawled by region

Region Number of sites and subsites crawled Corpus size (terabytes)

Americas (content hosted in Redmond data center)

128,435 sites together with 333,831 subsites

23.34

EMEA (content hosted in Dublin data center)

35,932 sites together with 89,591 subsites

6.6

Asia (content hosted in Singapore data center)

33,360 sites together with 61,901 subsites

4.53

Total

197,727 sites together with 485,323 subsites

34.47

In addition to the 34.47 terabytes of hosted SharePoint content, the search service crawls a large amount of other content, which includes the following:

  • Sites that are not hosted by MSIT

  • File shares

  • Structured data sources

Table 3 shows average incremental crawl times for some content sources with the SharePoint Server 2007 search solution compared to average incremental crawl times with the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint solution.

Table 3. Crawl performance comparison

Content source Average incremental crawl time with SharePoint Server 2007 solution (late 2009) Average incremental crawl time with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint solution

MSW

21 hours

40 minutes

SharePoint sites, excluding My Sites

145 hours

9 hours

My Sites

18 hours

2 hours

Redmond portals

35 hours

4 hours

User profiles

7 hours

10 minutes

Host headers

19 hours

1 hour

Team

Deleted in 2009 to reduce crawl load

2 hours

Office

Deleted in 2009 to reduce crawl load

4 hours

To view the white paper as a single article on TechNet, or to download it, see Improving enterprise search at Microsoft: How FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Powers Worldwide Intranet Search at Microsoft (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735129.aspx).