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

2. Introduction Feature allows users to search Fast and Secure
Backend offloaded to a Search Engine
Natural language searching

3. User Experience

4. Included Content Most core content
3rd party must update to add support
Hopefully database is included by Moot time.

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

6. Example Topography Users Load Balancer cron server web server
DB server
Search server

7. Apache Solr Search server by Apache Foundation
Requires Java 8 (or OpenJDK 1.8.x)
Requires PECL-solr on PHP servers

8. Solr Administration Recommend Solr 5.0 or greater
Multiple sites in one Solr install
Supports clustering for very busy sites

10. 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

11. File Indexing Solr supports file indexing with Tika
Some areas that are indexed:
File/Folder Resources
Forum post attachments
Assignment attachments

12. Large Site Considerations
Solr is very memory hungry
Plan on 10-20GB of RAM just for Solr
solr start –m 12g

13. 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

14. Questions?