V8 beta release now available

[Ray]

Hi everyone,

Zoom V8 is finally in beta and available for download.

The beta release will currently accept V7 license keys.

However, please note the final V8 release will require upgrade keys. Any body who has purchased Zoom within 6 months of the final release date will get a Free Upgrade key. Older users will be able to purchase the upgrade at a discounted cost of the full license.

Major new features introduced in V8 include:

• OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Index and search for text that appear in images (Win10 only)
• Broad numeric matching: Allow for better searching of currency values and part numbers (e.g. $12,300.99 will match 12300 and 12300.99)
• Multi-threaded Offline Mode indexing: Up to 3x faster offline indexing. Engine was nearly totally re-written to be multi-threaded.
• Performance improvement: Overall indexing speed and memory usage has been optimized, to index more pages and faster than previous versions.
• RAM drive: Reduce indexing speed for plugin processing files (e.g. PDF, DOC, PPT, images, etc.)
• New revamped FTP engine featuring SFTP and FTPS (SSL/TLS) support
• http:// and https:// URL insensitive: Better support for sites which switch between HTTP and HTTPS.
• 64-bit Indexer is no longer limited to Enterprise Edition. Automatic installation of 64-bit indexer on all 64-bit Windows OS.
• Many other bug fixes and improvements.

Please let us know if you have any questions or trouble with the release.

UPDATE: The final V8 release is now available (6/March/2019)

[radiodavid]

I just installed V8 and it is between 200% and 300% faster, and I note it is using multiple threads. Is there any way to set it to use more than the default 3 threads?

I also love the fact that it launched as a 64 bit app without having to specifically look for that version.

One bug: when files being indexed are very long, the display "URL" field can not be opened to be wider to display the full path and file names.

[radiodavid]

I discovered the thread usage control under scan options. Set at 10 threads, less than 30% CPU usage and about 7 times faster than 7.1.

Files upload faster on this version, but they don't seem to be able to rename from *.tmp to the actual names. I get the message shown in the attachment.

[Ray]

Thanks for the bug report. We've reproduced the rename bug with FTP. It will be fixed in the next beta build.

[radiodavid]

Good news as I continue to use and enjoy V8. I tried one of my larger projects, which has over 1.2 million pages, many of them large newspaper-dimension and tabloid sized. It scanned at a rate of 440,000 pages an hour. With Version 7.1 I was lucky to get 45,000 pages an hour. Same computer, but using maximum number of cores! Wonderful improvement. I've been a user since 2010, and I am really excited by this upgrade.

[firstrebel]

I take it this will install in a different location on a Windows PC and can be used alongside V7.1 on the server?

Bob

[firstrebel]

I have just run v8 for the first time and have a few things to point out.

The first is the error in the display of "CPU load information" which appears on the bottom left.



The second is that after the indexing is complete there is still one thread showing 85%



The last is the different number of files indexed between v8 and v7.1. In the attachment v8 is on the left and v7.1 on the right.



Bob

[firstrebel]

I used the 64-bit version of v8 and it took 8 minutes compared with 30 minutes for v7.1. The zoom_pagetext.zdat file is down from 210,000kb to 45,000kb. I hope that is through compression and not less text.

No major issues so far.

Bob

[firstrebel]

Here is another inconsistency.

This is the search page for 7.1

https://www.volvoclub.org.uk/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi

And if you search on xc40 it brings up 4 pages.

Using v8

https://www.volvoclub.org.uk/cgi-bin/search2/search.cgi

it brings up 3 pages.

Bob

[Ray]

Hi Bob,

Noted the visual problems that needs to be fixed.

According to your index summary, it seems like V8 encountered 18 more errors, and 700 less PDF files. So that would be a good place to start figuring out what happened.

Can you e-mail us the full index log file from V8 (and for comparison, the V7 file) and we can take a look at what these errors might be.

Would also be of help if you can zip up the two sets of index files for us to download.

Thanks.

EDIT: We fixed a bug yesterday with http and https. This bug caused some files to be skipped when a http:// to https:// redirection occurred. Your problems may be related to this but if you send us the files, we would be able to confirm it.

[Ray]

V8 beta 2 is now available on the beta release page.

We have fixed a number of bugs including:
- Fixed bug with error message "Error: CRC for URL clashed" which caused some pages redirecting from http:// to https:// to not be indexed in Spider Mode. (does not affect Offline mode)
- Fixed bug with 'No title' appearing for PDF files
- Fixed bug with HTML tags appearing in PDF context and indexed content
- Fixed bug with not indexing file dates in Offline Mode for PDF files and some other file types.
- Fixed bug with FTP upload rename operation (causing error message "FTP rename failed: QUOT command failed with 550")
- Fixed various GUI and Help file issues

Outstanding issues (we will look at these after the Christmas break):
- There is a timing issue when running with multiple threads in Spider Mode that may cause a freeze-up on some computers.
- FTP upload may timeout for very large files.
- Version and build numbers are not incrementing for the beta releases yet, we will fix this too.

[firstrebel]

Hi Bob,

Noted the visual problems that needs to be fixed.

According to your index summary, it seems like V8 encountered 18 more errors, and 700 less PDF files. So that would be a good place to start figuring out what happened.

Can you e-mail us the full index log file from V8 (and for comparison, the V7 file) and we can take a look at what these errors might be.

Would also be of help if you can zip up the two sets of index files for us to download.

Thanks.

EDIT: We fixed a bug yesterday with http and https. This bug caused some files to be skipped when a http:// to https:// redirection occurred. Your problems may be related to this but if you send us the files, we would be able to confirm it.

Ray,

Your email was correct about file size. It seems that when I imported the config file from v7.1 the file size defaulted to 2Mb. Number are now back up. Thanks.

One thing I noticed in Beta 2 is the strange blue box under search form appearance.

[David]

Blue box is just an icon for decoration. It doesn't serve any other purpose.

[radiodavid]

One interesting thing: I have one search project that has 73 categories, and index 4,345,000 PDF files. When I get a results display, it shows, where normally there would just be the one search category the found matches would go (to the right of the file name and in brackets) I get a listing of all 73 categories, going on for line after line....

Attachment 1 is a couple of result finds from an actual search, and Attachment 2 is the search page showing the categories.

[Tapio]

I checked the behavior of "Surrounding words" in Zoom_v8_beta2, which bug was reported in a thread under Zoom V7, posted Nov 7th 2018.

The fix in V8b2 made a difference, but not an improvement. As told, I have lots of small files, with context description size of 1000 words (to ensure showing the entire text in result page). Total number words in the first 6 files are close to 500. Link text to the file itself is taken from the title field.

In changed behavior, if I search a word in any of those first six files, the quoted text in the result page is always the text from the second file!! However, the link text and link to the file itself is correct, only the quoted text is from wrong file, in files # 1 and 3 to 6.