Stuff that could make a difference:

• For Incremental crawls (of regular SharePoint content)
  • Farm architecture
    • Is the indexer (and/or the target server) host separated or doing other tasks?  If it’s doing other tasks, you must take into account the kind of load it’s under and when that load is high and low.
    • Is the database host(s) scaled in a way that running crawls don’t impact user traffic?
    • What’s your “Indexer Performance” level set to?
    • How fast does your indexer crawl?  (i.e. items per hour or items per day)
  • Content
    • How many items are currently (or at the time of go-live) in your index?
    • How frequent does it change?
    • What kind of content is it?  Big pdfs and Word docs?  SharePoint lists and news posts only?
    • What’s the anticipated growth rate of the content?
    • Are there any documented requirements for search freshness?

• For Full crawls (of regular SharePoint content)
  • Pretty much the same stuff as above
  • Can you get away with doing incremental only?  (See this TechNet page in the “Reasons to do a full crawl” section for info about when you must use full crawls instead of incrementals.)

• For profile import
  • Number of exposed profiles
  • Configuration of Mysites and number of mapped properties
  • Can AD handle the load?
  • Is the SSP server doing other roles?
  • Profile freshness requirements

Real life example:

The my current client projecthas pretty fast servers, 14+ million items in index, 40,000 users, and 4 WFEs.  We would be doing incremental crawls only if we can get around a technical issue.  Full crawls take about 4 days. (a bit over 4 million items crawled per day)  Until the problem is fixed, we have been doing full crawls once a week but we really can’t keep it up.  Incremental crawls happen nightly and are most often done before the work day begins. (This is unless users used Explorer View to move or change millions of items the previous day.)

As for profile imports, since MySites are not exposed for all 40,000 users, profile imports happen very fast.  Incrementals happen in under 20 minutes and fulls finish in a couple hours on Sunday mornings.  However, this summer we will expose SP 2010 mysites for all 40,000 users with some fairly moderate custom mappings.  When that happens we will be putting into some serious tuning focus to make sure that it happens efficiently. 

Here and here are some good tuning tips for MOSS… most are probably relevant for SP 2010 also.  Also, the “Inside the Index and Search Engines: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007” book has been pretty helpful.

BUT, in R2 of Server 2008, the most important one of these is locked down and won’t let you change it.  If you try to change the “IIS WAMREG admin Service” in R2 you’ll see a grayed out screen like this:

Even if you’re a full admin, you’re still locked out.  It turns out you have to into regedit and give yourself permissions to the corresponding registry key just to be ABLE to modify it in DCOM.  I found full instructions to fix it up in this blog post: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Fix-the-SharePoint-DCOM-10016-error-on-Windows-Server-2008-R2.aspx

I had to pass this on.  Because I we’ll be running into this a lot as we get involved with MOSS installs on Server 2008 R2 servers.

Someone needed to move a Document Library from one site collection to another one.  The only viable way to do this is to go to the library settings for that doc library and export it as a list template with content.  When I did that I received the in-SharePoint error saying:

“The list is too large to save as a template. The size of a template cannot exceed 10485760 bytes.” 

This poses a problem because the only other (non third-party tool) way to do this would involve exporting a copy of the original site and then importing it into the destination site collection so that I would be able to use Site Manager to move the list.

Well it turns out there is an undocumented property that can be modified to change this.  Run the following command to see what your farm is currently set to:

stsadm.exe –o getproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size

Chances are the reply will be “<Property Exist=No" />”, which means that you are using the default setting of 10 MB as your limit.  You can set the limit to something higher by using the “setproperty” switch.  For example:

stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size –propertyvalue 500000000

would increase the limit to about 60 MB.

In my case this was really a one-time thing so, after I had created the copy of the document library, I set the size back to the original 10485760 byte value.

Out of the box, MOSS is set to run the profile sync timer job once every hour.  So I ran the following command to show me which content DBs haven’t been synced in the last day:

stsadm.exe -o sync -listolddatabases 1

On my vpc, it looks like this:

This looks helpful except for the fact that nobody knows what the GUID of their content DBs are.  On the client farm there some DBs with very old dates and I could tell something was wrong.  I needed to figure out what the names of the DBs with the old GUIDs are.  The easiest way to do that is to browse to Central Administration and mouse-over your content DBs.  Then you can eyeball the DB GUIDs in the status bar of your browser as it shows you the URL of the hyperlink.  It looks like this:

The GUID of the content DB you are pointing to starts after the “DatabaseID=%7B” in your status bar. Also take note that the “%2D” in the status bar refers to the hyphen character.  Now you know the GUID of that SharePoint Content Database.

I tried going back to the command-line to use stsadm to force it to sync.  To do that I just typed in:

stsadm.exe –o sync

I waited a while and even checked the timer job status in Central Admin and waited for it to say the Profile Sync job had completed successfully.  It turns out that this sync command only forces the “quick” version which does not go through the same job that that is scheduled for every hour.  I was disappointed to see that my content database did not get updated so now I used stsadm to wipe out my profile sync info for the databases with old data.  The following command will delete the profile sync data for databases that haven’t been synced in the last day:

stsadm.exe –o sync –deleteolddatabases

I was feeling good about myself at this point but after double-checking my work I learned that it STILL had not synced.  There was no getting around it, I had to look at the ULS logs.  When I poked around I found a line that kept showing up that alarmed me.  Referring to “SharePoint Portal Server User Profiles” the description portion of the error said something like “Aborting sweepsynch for guid instance {SomeGUID} due to null or non-online content database”.

This sounded familiar to me because I knew we had left some content databases in “offline” mode to prevent them from getting new site collections created in them (they’re already too big).  So when I looked back in Central Administration to see which databases were offline, it turned out to be every one of the ones that weren’t syncing the profiles.

This isn’t documented anywhere but it looks like content databases that are marked as “offline” in central administration will not get synced with profile sync jobs.  Once I turned them all back to “ready”, I had a very looooong running profile sync job after that and it was all clear from there on out.

I thought I had seen this info on Updates Resource Center page but either I was wrong or it’s gone now. I

It took me a while but I found it on technet. It’s on the “Deploy software updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007” TechNet page in the “Available Updates” section.

Not only is it there, but it appears to be updated.

I’m working with a farm right now that can crawl around 1,000,000 items in 24 hours. We’re working on increasing that right now by getting a faster PDF ifilter and tuning some things up but it’s only going to take us so far.

At some point soon we’re going to have to start considering some of the SSP and search wizardry mentioned in this awesome whitepaper from Microsoft IT, “SharePoint Performance Optimization”

You can get the packs here:

• SP2 for WSS v3
• SP2 for MOSS 2007

What’s really important is that this is a great chance for you to work some bugs out of your SharePoint deployment. SP2 combines all of the previous CU cumulative patches and adds improvement to:

• performance
• reliability
• search and crawling
• alternative browser support

Don’t forget to do regression testing with any existing custom code or 3rd party solutions before you commit to deploying into production.  Plan a relatively large maintenance window because you must deploy the pack for WSS first and then MOSS and each time you must run them in succession one after another.  For more direction on deploying SharePoint updates, see the TechNet article here.  Although it’s not updated quite yet, there will be more information about it posted soon on the "Updates Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies" also found on TechNet.  And, as you might have guessed, Joel Oleson has a very useful and comprehensive post about the goodies that are baked into SP2.

New Search features such as federated search and a unified search administration dashboard.

This seems to be coming up a lot with larger companies and a few Govt. agencies.  The ability to easily join searches from multiple farms with multiple content.

Several core fixes to Search to improve performance and scale.

Platform performance improvements and fixes.

Both of these could be a very big deal as we are seeing companies and agencies that are really testing the “recommended” boundaries of architecture in things like document libraries, custom lists, and amount of site collections in a web application.  I have seen a document library with 1,000,000+ pdf’s in it.  And it was completely indexed.

Don’t forget to RTFM when installing patches to SharePoint, kiddies.

UPDATE: Browse here for very important installation instructions.

Follow these instructions to turn on SMTP and set it to use your current mail server as a Smart Host e-mail relay with authentication:

1. Go into Computer Management and click to view Services.  Find “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)” service and verify that it is started and it’s startup type is Automatic.
   
2. Go into the IIS Manager and right-click on Default SMTP Virtual Server and click on Properties.  After the “Default SMTP Virtual Server Properties” window opens, click on the Delivery tab and then click on the Advanced button. 
   
   
3. In the “Advanced Delivery” window, click on the text box under Smart Host and enter in the FQDN of your production mail server.  Click OK. 
   
   
4. Still in the Delivery tab, click on the Outbound Security button.  In the “Outbound Security” window select the radial for Basic Authentication and put your own username and password for the server you entered in step 3 in the provided boxes.  (see the screenshot)  If it’s a Windows mail server, you will probably use the style in the screenshot.  Otherwise, you will need to check the documentation from your mail provider to see how to enter in SMTP credentials.  Click OK. 
   
   
5. Now you need to give yourself permission to relay mail through your SMTP server.  Back in the SMTP Virtual Server Properties window, click on the Access tab and then click on the Relay button.  Make sure the radial for “Only the list below” is selected and click on the Add button to add an IP that is allowed to relay.
   
6. In the window that pops up, select the radial for Single computer and enter in the IP address for the loopback adapter, (127.0.0.1) .  click OK 3 times to set all of your changes. 
   
   
7. Stop and start the “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)” service and follow these instructions (link to Microsoft Support KB) to test your SMTP server.

Purpose:

The reason this is important is that some people are convinced that they have to uninstall SharePoint or even completely rebuild their box in order to start from scratch.  This is not so.

NOTE:: 

• This assumes you’ve backed up and kept everything you want to keep.
• The psconfig.exe command is located in the “%WINDIR%\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin” folder.
• this does not remove any custom code or other types of files from the 12 hive
• this procedure will keep the SharePoint patch and service pack level of the host so there’s no need to rerun hotfixes or anything

Procedure:

1. From the host that runs Central Admionistration, run this command psconfig.exe -cmd configdb -disconnect to disconnect Central Admin from your database.
2. Run this command: psconfig.exe -cmd adminvs -unprovision to unprovision the Central Administration site.
3. Delete all application pools and web sites from affected IIS servers.
4. Delete any SQL user databases related to SharePoint e.g. SharedServices*,SharePoint_AdminContent*,SharePoint_Config,WSS_Search

Now you’re ready to run the Configuration Wizard just as if you had never set up a farm.

TechNet info on psconfig.exe

“I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit…  It’s the only way to be sure.“

  – Aliens