User Guide

180 Chapter 8 Verity Spider
Maintenance Options
-nooptimize
Prevents the Verity Spider from optimizing the collection, thus reducing processing
overhead during the indexing job. Use this option sparingly, as it leaves the collection
in less than optimum shape. Some examples of when you might want to use this
option are:
• You want to manually perform custom optimization of the collection, using
mkvdk. By default the Verity Spider optimization mimics the mkvdk actions of
maxmerge and vdbopt. For more information on mkvdk, see the Verity Collection
Building Guide.
• You are running multiple indexing jobs against a collection, and want to wait
until they are all finished to optimize.
Generally, you should not leave a collection unoptimized for too long, as search
times can slow significantly.
In brief, optimizing a collection means creating a small number of large partitions,
which can greatly reduce search times.
-purge
Deletes document tables and index files in the collection, and cleans up the
collection’s persistent store. The collection is then "fresh" with its original style files,
and is not deleted from the file system.
-repair
Specifies a failure-recovery mode for the collection, where the goal is to determine
the causes of any errors, repair the errors (if possible), and bring a collection back up.
Although the Verity indexing engine always leaves the collection in a consistent,
usable state, and no data can be lost or corrupted due to machine failures, it is
possible for a process or event external to the Verity engine to corrupt one or more
collections.
You can use
-repair for constant failure-recovery operation, or you can run it
selectively on collections that are "down."