Subscribers with websites using the Acquia Search platform have limits for some or all of the following resources: total queries, documents, and disk space. If these limits are consistently met or exceeded, Acquia reserves the right to restrict the website’s use of the shared search resources or move your website to a dedicated Acquia Search instance at your expense.
Acquia will not generally block access to your Solr index. However, a block could occur in an emergency where your or another customer’s data or service could be impacted.
If you are still below limits
If you are not yet at your limit, you can proactively take steps to prevent your website from ever reaching them. Here are some factors to consider as you plan for usage:
- What is your monthly usage like?
- How is your content growing?
- How much indexable content will your site be generating monthly?
- If you are indexing files, what is your projected growth? Large attachments can cause problems for your index.
- What are your traffic patterns like?
- Do you expect a growth in visits that trigger search queries?
- Are you adding any new functionality, such as content recommendation blocks, autocomplete widgets, or others that increase the number of requests to Solr?
- What is your non-production usage?
- Are you using independent Solr indexes for testing environments?
- Will there be heavy searching or indexing in non-production environments?
If you are concerned you may exceed your limits, your next step is to create a Support ticket, or contact your account manager to get help determining the best fit for your website.
If you’ve exceeded the limits
If you have exceeded your subscription limits, here are some of the possible actions Acquia may take:
- In case of an extended usage spike that may be exceeding your current limits, you may be moved into an isolated Search cluster; this may incur extra costs. Acquia may contact you to discuss this change.
- Your account manager or Acquia Support may contact you with options to change your subscription. We offer multiple Acquia Search packages which vary in storage size, query limits, and number of documents allowed.
- You can review your monthly usage and work to reduce usage.
Reducing index usage
Acquia Search uses three metrics for your subscription: disk storage size, number of Solr requests from Drupal, and the number of documents in the index. You can use different strategies to reduce usage in one or more of these areas.
Reduce non-production indexes
All of your Acquia subscription’s Solr indexes (production and non-production) count toward your limits. Reduce usage of some or all non-production indexes, or remove indexes entirely to stay within your subscription bounds.
Reducing requests to Solr
Several issues can trigger a high number of requests to your Acquia Search Solr backend:
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
| Autocomplete widgets powered by Solr |
|
| Usage of More Like This content recommendation blocks | Cache these blocks or reduce their usage. |
| Elevated traffic that triggers Solr queries | Often caused by crawlers following links that trigger Solr requests.
For more information, see Block excessive crawling of Drupal Views or search results. |
| The Index immediately option is enabled in Search API. | Compounded by mass importing or editing of content.
|
| The Search 404 module is enabled. | Made worse by crawlers and traffic.
|
| Mass content edits, imports or migrations | Disable indexing while doing any mass content handling. |
| Out of date modules | Ensure your modules are up to date. |
If you’re using Drupal 7, one way to understand what data is being sent to your Solr index is to use the Solr Devel module, which adds a Devel > Solr tab on each entity. This enables you to see what’s already in your Solr index and what data would be sent if you were to index an item.
Disk storage size
If you aren’t careful about what you are indexing, the size of your Solr index can increase rapidly, consuming excessive disk space. There are several potential causes:
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
Automated Solr optimize isn’t running | The Optimize Solr operation is usually invoked weekly by Drupal modules and is responsible for reclaiming disk space after deletes and garbage collection.
|
| Indexing too many fields or entity data | This often occurs when indexing nodes with many comments.
|
| Indexing large attachments with large amounts of text | Large PDF or text files can fill disk space quickly.
|
Number of documents indexed
The relationship between the number of Drupal entities and number of Solr documents is not always one-to-one; Drupal can process a single entity such as a node or a user into multiple Solr documents. For example:
node/1has three attached files. This can create four Solr documents; one for the node, and one for each attachment.node/1has field data in three languages. This may create four Solr documents; one for each language.
To reduce the number of documents in your Solr index:
- Avoid using Solr multilingual modules if your site uses a single language.
- Avoid indexing attachments as separate Solr documents.
- Index only the content types that must be searchable.