Version 7 is FAST

[radiodavid]

I've now been using V 7 for about 8 hours, and have reindexed a number of the databases on my site and notice that the speed is between 100% and 120% improved, while CPU usage is less. I've tested the newly indexed sections, and they are all perfect! I've not used any of the new features, but the installation went perfectly on top of my old V 6 install and every configuration works.

[Ray]

Glad to hear you're noticing the difference!

A lot of the core functionality in Zoom V7 was rewritten (for the purpose of cross platform compatibility) and in many cases, we would improve the old code where possible.

Plugin files should be indexing faster than before, especially in Offline Mode.

Spider mode should be faster too -- we have a new HTTP engine in place, and improved link finding methods. It should find more links, crawl faster, and use less memory.

Also a big improvement was the redesign in the engine that allows us to not require a "Max. unique words limit". You no longer have to guesstimate the number of dictionary words on your site, and re-run the index over and over again because you've unwittingly hit your max words limit (as you did in V6). Now Zoom can dynamically handle more words without knowing in advance. You still have the option to enforce a limit however, should you need to restrict the size of your index for other reasons.

[sizbut]

Ray,

Nice to learn that the word limits are now longer required. Whilst the new features are well documented, for those of us upgrading (done so yesterday) would be useful to have some list of '"what's changed" items such as that, ie. things in our existing configs that we might need to change, consider changing.

The one I hit yesterday was the use of relative paths in the Windows version of the indexer. I had .. as the path to index and . as the place to save the results. Worked fine in V6 but appears not to work in V7. Not fatal, the logger told me what was happening, easy enough to put exact paths into the config and I don't move my configs often. In my book a small lose for a total rewrite of the indexer but a gotcha to warn people upgrading about.

[Ray]

Mark -- good point, we hope to have a list of upgrade "gotchas", but to be honest, so much has been rewritten that some of it's a little hard to document.

For example, the use of relative paths for the Start folder and Output folder -- this was not an intentional change, nor was the handling of relative paths something we intentionally supported or designed for, in previous versions. We've always expected absolute paths here, so it was just lucky that relative paths was handled by the previous code. The new code uses a different way to iterate through the folders, and not only is it cross platform but it fixed a few bugs in this area. So we really couldn't have foreseen that it broke support for a feature we didn't originally intend.

Having said that, we really appreciate you letting us know so we can be aware of it in the future, should any other users be using relative paths for their start or output folder.

Please do let us know if any other differences pop up, and hopefully this can serve as a useful resource on the forum.