Global Search: An Introduction and Administrator Perspective Eric Merrill Oakland University merrill@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.

Search Engines New plugin type Only 1 ships with Moodle currently Apache Solr More to come

Example Topography Users Load Balancer cron server web server DB server Search 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 Future indexing done by cron 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?