SnTT - Which Database has an FTI?

Earlier this year, Martin Vogel and I gave a session at Engage titled "Teaching Young and Old Dogs New  Tricks: Notes & Domino Shortcuts You Wish You Knew," It was a great session with a filled capacity of the room.

But I was neglectful; I had planned to post some essential tips in my blog at the time but did not get to it. I will try to make up for it over the next few weeks.

The first one that not everyone may know about is how to find out which databases have a FTI, Full Text Index.

Here is the scenario:

You are asked to build new servers for your customer or organization and while looking at the old server, notice some indexing on some databases. This causes you to think, how do I find out which databases have an FTI so they can be rebuilt on the new server?

Good question, right?

I will first provide an answer for anyone not on R12 and then post the R12 way.

Pre R12 FTI Details for any given Database

1. Open the catalog.ntf in the designer client
2. Open the Views List
3. Edit the Applications\by Server view
4. Insert a column where you want it, and name it FT Index
5. Change the field for this new column to DbFullTextIndexed
6. Set the column to sort both ways
7. Save your changes
8. Replace the design of your catalog.nsf

NOTE: This presumes all your databases are set to show in the catalog.nsf, so not 100% foolproof

The R12 way to see FTI Details for all Databases on Your Server

Open the Administrator client

Go to the Files tab

Click on File-Preferences-Administration Preferences

Select the Files Tab

Add the FT Index (see screenshot below, FT Index is the last one in the list)

Reorder the column location, or it may end up in the 27th column

Restart the Administrator client to see the change

If you need it, you can copy and paste the full view into Excel if that helps you track what you are doing.

Pretty cool if you ask me that this got added in R12. I had asked for it in an Aha request, and it got done, so Aha is listened to by HCL, here is the link to that request:

https://domino-ideas.hcltechsw.com/ideas/DOMINO-I-264

It was the first item added to the column list since before R9 at least.

SnTT - NIF means NOT INDEXING FULLY

Sometimes I need to be more granular than I am when troubleshooting problems.
I don't like to be because I feel it inhibits my ability to grok the total issue.
But some servers just demand it.

Admittedly NIF stands for Notes Indexing Facility. But my explanation is more accurate when it is not functioning.

So I ran DCT, the excellent Domino Configuration Tuner on the clients Domino Windows server running 703FP1, after temporarily installing the 8.5 client on the server.

It of course told me the basics I know already, mutlithread the full text index, enhance various other notes.ini settings like:
UPDATE_FULLTEXT_THREAD=1
SERVER_NAME_LOOKUP_NO_UPDATE=1
DEBUG_ENABLE_UPDATE_FIX=8191
NSF_BACKUP_MEMORY_CONSTRAINED=1
SF_BACKUP_MEMORY_LIMIT=104857600

and my personal favorite: view_rebuild_dir=e:\lotustemp\

This last line allows you to specify where the temporary space required for the rebuilds are located. always helpful when one of the hard drives is running low and can lead to other issues.

The bottom line is the problem occurs and it seems to be an agent which is stuck. Thought about and DCT confirmed, web agents were not running concurrently, trying that change too.

Enable agents to run asynchronously through the Server document -> Internet Protocols -> Domino Web Engine tab. Under Web Agents, enable the "Run Web Agents Concurrently" setting.

And found a very corrupted file, which turned out to be some bad restored file anyway.
Cleared it all and what happened? dead server in 2 days instead of 1. Improvement yes, fixed, no.

Called IBM Support, I had done more than my usual efforts and was tired of trying.

They suggested using the line, ftg_use_sys_memory=1, which came out in 5.0.9, link to the technote.

This will instruct the full-text (FT) engine to use direct malloc calls from the operating system for large allocations, instead of requesting memory through the Notes Memory Manager.

And we wait to see if this indeed fixed it as IBM suggested. Updated late Wen. night, it did not resolve it, although it hung on longer.

Issue seems to be when users are logging in during the morning, I wonder about peaking or utilization.