Hi, Ian,

Quite a lot to chew on - thank you! I understand your process is able to run 
continuously yet, to keep the site running smoothly, the process takes short 
breaks and imposes a size limit on the merges. That size limit requires you to 
initiate the residual merge during a low usage period.

Do you believe the size of the documents being updated would impact this 
approach? Our files can be quite large. It is common for folders to include 
multiple 10 - 20 MB files. We do have files approaching the 300 MB limit.

-Brent

________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ian Small
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2008 2:52 PM
To: General Mark Logic Developer Discussion
Subject: RE: [MarkLogic Dev General] CORB: Sleep during configurable hours 
andprocess 1 forest at a time

hi -

while we don't use corb to do it, we do in fact to large-scale in-place 
modifications of the markmail.org production content set.  we take a similar 
approach to yours:
- only work on one forest (in our case, per D node) at once
- we manage the concurrency of the work to make sure there are lots of cores 
available for user queries
- we pause in between small bursts of reprocessing
- we manage monster merges manually so that they happen during our low usage 
time (we have global users, so this is between about 6pm and 2 am pacific)

we do all this because, like you, we are working around live load on the server 
and need to maintain response time while all this is going on

some things to keep note of:
- pausing between every operation can backfire - because if the pause is long 
enough, it can "trick" the server into thinking that there are no more updates 
coming, which can cause an in-memory stand to be flushed out to disk.  the 
result if this is that a bunch of really small in-memory stands can get shot 
out to disk, requiring more merges - although those merges will be incredibly 
fast and incredibly lightweight.  so we tend to keep our pauses short enough to 
make sure we give other processing some time to get through.  so you may want 
to experiment on this front a little bit.
- we NEVER turn off merges - this is essentially playing russian roulette, and 
committing to pull the trigger 12 times while waiting to see what happens.  
what we do is limit the large merges (where large is compared to our forest 
size).  in our case, with 200 GB forests, we might stick our limit at 75-100 
GB, for instance.  that generally leaves us with a forest with 2-4 stands in 
it, which we can then merge manually in low times.
- we start the manual "all done" merges using the forest admin pages

in general, we take this approach because we plan our reprocessing sufficient 
in advance that we can have it take days, sometimes even 10 days.  we haven't 
had to be in a crash program to have to rework the content set so i can't share 
any real-world experience there.

ian


________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Hartwig, Brent 
(CL Tech Sv)
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2008 8:03 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [MarkLogic Dev General] CORB: Sleep during configurable hours 
andprocess 1 forest at a time
Hello,

Has anyone extended Corb to sleep during configurable periods or process one 
forest at a time?

We need to modify every object in our ML instance. Multiple merges are 
saturating the IO channel. To keep production stable and usable, we intend to 
put the job to sleep during peak hours and only process one forest at a time. 
Each processed URI will go into a collection, allowing us to verify all are 
processed. Preliminary approaches are described below. Your thoughts and 
experience are welcome. Thank you in advance.

Sleep: Nothing too concerning here (but tried & true is always better). We're 
planning to work around backups, peak hours and allow time for system resources 
to recover before peak hours resume.

Forest: Corb can obtain a list of forests from the specified database via 
Session.getContentbaseMetaData().getForestIds() and iterate in serial. The 
queue would be populated once per forest by substituting the forest ID within 
the provided URIS-MODULE. The initial implementation may impose some usage 
constraints.

-Brent
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