Defrag index volumes?

[Nate_D1]

I was reading through the EV10 best practice indexing guide (dec 2011) and ran into this:

"The index files quickly become fragmented on disk, even if there is a large volume of free storage capacity. This file fragmentation can cause severe performance problems which need to be managed on any index storage device. Either an automated background file defragmentation product or scheduled device defragmentation must be employed."

I did a little searching around to see what symantecs stance on this was and this is all I could find:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/defrag-enterprise-vault-server

Does anyone have any suggestions on this? We have never run a defrag on these index volumes.

[AndrewB · Accepted solution]

i wouldnt worry about defragging unless your environment has a ton of expiry going on. even then, it might not be necessary and you definitely would want to take indexing offline (not backup mode but stop the index service) if you felt it was necessary to defrag.

what version of EV are you on? if you're not on EV10 with all your indexes upgraded to 64bit then that's the best thing you could possibly do.

[Nate_D1]

We just upgraded to EV10 recently and I am reading up on converting the indexes and ran into this information. I will keep on the path of upgrading our indexes to 64bit, we had no real performance issues I just wondered if as a best practice we were lacking.

[AndrewB]

sounds like you're on the right track. the new indexes have very few files, not like the old model with millions of tiny files so it's much more efficient on disk too.