Global Search: An Introduction and Administrator Perspective

Global Search:An Introduction and Administrator Perspective

Eric MerrillOakland Universitymerrill@oakland.edu

Introduction

Feature allows users to search

Fast and Secure

Backend offloaded to a Search Engine

Natural language searching

User Experience

Included Content

Most core content

3rd party must update to add support

Hopefully database is included by Moot time.

4

Search Engines

New plugin type

Only 1 ships with Moodle currently

Apache Solr

More to come

Example Topography

Users

Load Balancer

cron server

Search server

DB server

web server

web server

Apache Solr

Search server by Apache Foundation

Requires Java 8 (or OpenJDK 1.8.x)

Requires PECL-solr on PHP servers

Solr Administration

Recommend Solr 5.0 or greater

Multiple sites in one Solr install

Supports clustering for very busy sites

Indexing

Initial index may take long time

Test site took ~12hr for 1.8M records

Resulting index was 4.6GB on disk

Run from command line

Future indexing done by cron

Incremental

Every 30 min

File Indexing

Solr supports file indexing with Tika

Some areas that are indexed:

File/Folder Resources

Forum post attachments

Assignment attachments

Large Site Considerations

Solr is very memory hungry

Plan on 10-20GB of RAM just for Solr

solr start m 12g

Large Site Considerations

Solr Crash

May crash during large initial index

Enable few areas at a time and run index from command line

Use Moodle admin UI to delete crashed search area, then attempt to index again

Questions?