Scheduler Conflicts

[cdbw19]

We have about 150 websites we want to reindex once per week. We're using CGI and spider mode, and have Enterprise edition. After testing the indexer manually a few times, we've found that the smaller sites index in about 10-15 minutes, and the larger ones can take 90-120 minutes. We also found that if "Site A" was scheduled to be indexed at 3pm on Friday and "Site B" was scheduled for 3:30pm on Friday, if "Site A" hadn't finished by 3:30pm, its scheduling would get interrupted by "Site B" starting. Is there a way to avoid these conflicts, so that if one site isn't finished by the time another one starts, either they both run simultaneously or the second one doesn't start until the first has finished? As there are only 168 hours in a week, trying to arrange a schedule that doesn't have any conflicts is not an easy task, especially if the smaller sites grow.
Or, if for any reason, the scheduled task is unable to run, will it run again as soon as its able, and/or will there be any notice that it didn't run other than by checking the log?

[David]

There should be no reason that multiple sessions can't be run at the same time. Eventually you will run out of RAM and network bandwidth of course, but doing a few small sites at the same time should be OK.

What do you mean by "its scheduling would get interrupted"? Each scheduled job should launch a new instance of Zoom. A 2nd task being launched shouldn't effect the 1st task.

[Ray]

The critical thing with running multiple indexing sessions simultaneously is that they must write to different Output Directories.

It would also help if there is no overlap within the indexing folder locations, even though Zoom should only need read access to these files, sometimes third party applications such as Anti-virus scanners are triggered and they will hold files open exclusively.

[cdbw19]

Thank you for your reply -

What do you mean by "its scheduling would get interrupted"? Each scheduled job should launch a new instance of Zoom. A 2nd task being launched shouldn't effect the 1st task.

As it turned out, the issue I had where the scheduling got interrupted (meaning that the tmp files were created but just remained even after the indexing window closed, and the zdat files were not updated for the first site that had been in the process of indexing when the second started) seems to have been a memory-related problem, due to a since-resolved issue with the CPU usage for the server that that site had been running on. But now, with that sever issue fixed, even though I do see that there is an increase in usage for multiple indexing instances running at once, it does seem to work to have multiple scheduled at the same time.

Slightly separately, when I input the user info on which the scheduled tasks are running, it doesn't check the username/pw combo when I input it, so if I accidentally mistype the pw, I don't know it unless I see it didn't run. Is there way to have it verify at the time of input?
And, is there a way to sort the scheduled list in Zoom? It doesn't give me a sorting option for any of the columns in the scheduler.

[Ray]

Slightly separately, when I input the user info on which the scheduled tasks are running, it doesn't check the username/pw combo when I input it, so if I accidentally mistype the pw, I don't know it unless I see it didn't run. Is there way to have it verify at the time of input?
And, is there a way to sort the scheduled list in Zoom? It doesn't give me a sorting option for any of the columns in the scheduler.

Zoom's interface for scheduling tasks is pretty basic and only helps you get started with scheduling the task and removing the task.

If you want to edit it further, we would recommend using the Windows Task Scheduler to modify the task that has been created. This includes testing the task ("Run task") to see if the user login details are OK, or if there is some other issue. It doesn't make much sense for us to invest our time re-implementing all the functionality that is available in Windows Task Scheduler.