Environment
Retain 4.0.2
Situation
How can I adjust Retain so that my search results come back faster? Or, if I care less about search results and want more search suggestions, is there a way to configure this?
Resolution
Yes. We found that the search suggestions on the left-hand panel were sometimes causing delays in search results displaying of up to 3 - 5 minutes sometimes. Of course, this is also dependent on the number of messages in the system and the power of the underlying hardware. Smaller systems didn't notice a significant impact if any, but larger ones did.
New to Retain 4.0.2 (not yet released as of the date of this article) is a feature that allows you to control the number of search suggestions that Retain goes after. Prior to Retain 4.0 and 4.0.1 were displaying 4500 rows of search suggestions. By reducing this to 30 rows, we got suggestion query times down to .1 - .3 seconds.
To change the defaults, edit the misc.properties file found in .../RetainServer/WEB-INF/classes/config
Look for search.suggestions
Here is what you'll find (note: the "//" at the beginning indicate comments):
// valid values for search.suggestions.rows is 0 to 150 (30 is default) 0 means don't do suggestions at all
// valid values for search.suggestions.to.display is 0 to 20 (15 is default)
// valid values for search.suggestion.corrections.to.display is 0 to 10 (5 is default)
//the total of search.suggestion.corrections.to.display and search.suggestions.to.display can't be greater than 20. If it is the suggestions
// will be displayed first and any drop down slots left over will be given to corrections.
search.suggestions.rows=30
search.suggestions.to.display=15
search.suggestion.corrections.to.display=5