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Ektron: High Indexing Service Processor Usage (Potential) Fix

Martin Jarvis
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Oct 21, 2011

CPOL

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Ektron: High Indexing Service Processor Usage (Potential) Fix

One of our larger clients Ektron sites has had a history of poor performance that always seemed to be related to Indexing immediately after publishing content or syncing content to the live environment.  The site heavily uses indexed smart form fields and indexed metadata fields for ordering/sorting lists of content.

The symptoms were:

  • High CIDAEMON processor usage (95-100% of a processor core)
  • Total Documents to Index in Indexing Service Manager getting stuck
  • Indexing Service ‘Service Too Busy’ exceptions
  • Analysing Crash Dumps of the CIDAEMON process shows the ‘hot’ thread stuck in the QLXFilter.dll module

After performing the basic performance optimisations (removing any unnecessary catalogs such as System and Web), there were no real performance improvements and as more content was added (at quite a high rate), the performance issues quickly became outages.

Fortunately, with support from Ektron, we managed to identify (and fix) the potential cause… a misconfiguration in one of the 3rd Party components the indexing service uses to parse the asset XML files. This file can be found in:

  • C:\Windows\System32\QLFiltXml.xml
  • C:\Windows\SysWOW64\QLFiltXml.xml (64 bit machines only)

Opening these files in Internet Explorer (and collapsing to just Top Level nodes) showed the default filters only:

image

There should be a filter for each configured smart form with indexed fields:

image

You can identify which smart form corresponds which filter by checking the ‘Title’ element.

It appears that during the upgrade from v7.6.6->v8.0.1, something went wrong which prevented the Ektron Windows Service from correctly maintaining the configuration file.

Repairing the QLXFilter Configuration

The steps to repair the file are fairly straightforward (but make sure Ektron support is at hand for any unforeseen complications!).

  1. Delete all Catalogs from the Indexing Service (via Indexing Service Manager)
  2. Stop the Indexing Service
  3. Ensure that QLXFilter.dll is properly registered.  Open a command prompt and execute 
    regsvr32 c:\Windows\System32\QLXFilter.dll
  4. Locate your ‘FriendlyNamesDefinition.txt' (check the ‘DefaultColumnFile’ property value of the ‘[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndexCommon]’ key) and remove any of the non-standard  columns (indexed smart form fields, etc.).

    A list of standard column definitions is: 

       1: [Names]
   2: DateCreated (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktDateCreated
   3: DateModified (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktDateModified
   4: GoLiveDate (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktGoLiveDate
   5: ExpiryDate (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktExpiryDate
   6: ExpiryType (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktExpiryType
   7: TaxCategory (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktTaxCategory
   8: ContentID (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktContentID
   9: ContentLanguage (DBTYPE_I4) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktContentLanguage
  10: ContentType (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktContentType 
  11: FolderId (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktFolderId
  12: QuickLink (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktQuickLink
  13: FolderName (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktFolderName 
  14: MapLongitude (DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktLongitude 
  15: MapLatitude (DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktLatitude 
  16: MapAddress (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktAddress 
  17: EDescription (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktEDescription 
  18: Keywords (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktKeywords 
  19: Title (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktTitle 
  20: MetaInfo (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktMetaInfo
  21: CMSPath (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktCMSPath
  22: CMSSize (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktCMSSize
  23: InPerm (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktInPerm
  24: Searchable (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktSearchable
  25: description  (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae  Ektdescription
  26: MapDate (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktMapDate
  27: ContentID64 (DBTYPE_I8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktContentID64
  28: FolderId64 (DBTYPE_I8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktFolderId64
  29: EProductType (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktProductType
  30: ESkuNumber(DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktSkuNumber
  31: ESizeMeasure (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktSizeMeasure
  32: EHeight(DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktHeight
  33: EWidth(DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktWidth
  34: ELength(DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktLength
  35: EWeight(DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktWeight
  36: EWeightMeasure (DBTYPE_I4) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktWeightMeasure
  37: EUnitsInStock (DBTYPE_I4) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktUnitsInStock
  38: EUnitsOnOrder (DBTYPE_I4) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktUnitsOnOrder
  39: EReorderLevel (DBTYPE_I4) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktReorderLevel
  40: EPurchased (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktPurchased
  41: EImage(DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
			d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktImage 
  42: ECurrencyId (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktCurrencyId 
  43: EListPrice (DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktListPrice 
  44: ESalePrice (DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktSalePrice 
  45: EBuyable (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktBuyable 
  46: xmlconfigid (DBTYPE_I8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae Ektxmlconfigid
  47: DisabledTaxCategory (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) = 
		d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktDisabledTaxCategory
  5. Run the Ektron ‘SearchConfigUI’ utility to ‘Create New Catalogs’ (after checking all the settings are correct).
  6. Once ‘SearchConfigUI’ has passed the ‘Updating XML Configuration for XML Content’ step, then you can ensure that:
    1. The QLFiltXml.xml file to ensure the correct filters have been installed
    2. The FriendlyNamesDefinition.txt to ensure that your indexed properties have been restored
  7. Once ‘SearchConfigUI’ has completed, then you should be able to monitor the Indexing Service scanning the files in a more reasonable and consistent manner

The performance issue should now be fixed/reduced, hope this helps.