Ektron: High Indexing Service Processor Usage (Potential) Fix

One of our larger clients Ektron sites has had a history of poor performance that always seemed to be related to Indexing immediately after publishing content or syncing content to the live environment.  The site heavily uses indexed smart form fields and indexed metadata fields for ordering/sorting lists of content.

The symptoms were:

• High CIDAEMON processor usage (95-100% of a processor core)
• Total Documents to Index in Indexing Service Manager getting stuck
• Indexing Service ‘Service Too Busy’ exceptions
• Analysing Crash Dumps of the CIDAEMON process shows the ‘hot’ thread stuck in the QLXFilter.dll module

After performing the basic performance optimisations (removing any unnecessary catalogs such as System and Web), there were no real performance improvements and as more content was added (at quite a high rate), the performance issues quickly became outages.

Fortunately, with support from Ektron, we managed to identify (and fix) the potential cause… a misconfiguration in one of the 3^rd Party components the indexing service uses to parse the asset XML files. This file can be found in:

• C:\Windows\System32\QLFiltXml.xml
• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\QLFiltXml.xml (64 bit machines only)

Opening these files in Internet Explorer (and collapsing to just Top Level nodes) showed the default filters only:

There should be a filter for each configured smart form with indexed fields:

You can identify which smart form corresponds which filter by checking the ‘Title’ element.

It appears that during the upgrade from v7.6.6->v8.0.1, something went wrong which prevented the Ektron Windows Service from correctly maintaining the configuration file.

Repairing the QLXFilter Configuration

The steps to repair the file are fairly straightforward (but make sure Ektron support is at hand for any unforeseen complications!).

1. Delete all Catalogs from the Indexing Service (via Indexing Service Manager)
2. Stop the Indexing Service
3. Ensure that QLXFilter.dll is properly registered.  Open a command prompt and execute

   regsvr32 c:\Windows\System32\QLXFilter.dll

4. Locate your ‘FriendlyNamesDefinition.txt' (check the ‘DefaultColumnFile’ property value of the ‘[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndexCommon]’ key) and remove any of the non-standard  columns (indexed smart form fields, etc.).

   A list of standard column definitions is:

    1: [Names]
    2: DateCreated (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktDateCreated
    3: DateModified (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktDateModified
    4: GoLiveDate (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktGoLiveDate
    5: ExpiryDate (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktExpiryDate
    6: ExpiryType (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktExpiryType
    7: TaxCategory (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktTaxCategory
    8: ContentID (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktContentID
    9: ContentLanguage (DBTYPE_I4) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktContentLanguage
   10: ContentType (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktContentType
   11: FolderId (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktFolderId
   12: QuickLink (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktQuickLink
   13: FolderName (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktFolderName
   14: MapLongitude (DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktLongitude
   15: MapLatitude (DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktLatitude
   16: MapAddress (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktAddress
   17: EDescription (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktEDescription
   18: Keywords (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktKeywords
   19: Title (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktTitle
   20: MetaInfo (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktMetaInfo
   21: CMSPath (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktCMSPath
   22: CMSSize (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktCMSSize
   23: InPerm (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktInPerm
   24: Searchable (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktSearchable
   25: description  (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae  Ektdescription
   26: MapDate (VT_FILETIME) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktMapDate
   27: ContentID64 (DBTYPE_I8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktContentID64
   28: FolderId64 (DBTYPE_I8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktFolderId64
   29: EProductType (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktProductType
   30: ESkuNumber(DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktSkuNumber
   31: ESizeMeasure (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktSizeMeasure
   32: EHeight(DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktHeight
   33: EWidth(DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktWidth
   34: ELength(DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktLength
   35: EWeight(DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktWeight
   36: EWeightMeasure (DBTYPE_I4) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktWeightMeasure
   37: EUnitsInStock (DBTYPE_I4) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktUnitsInStock
   38: EUnitsOnOrder (DBTYPE_I4) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktUnitsOnOrder
   39: EReorderLevel (DBTYPE_I4) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktReorderLevel
   40: EPurchased (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktPurchased
   41: EImage(DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
             d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktImage
   42: ECurrencyId (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktCurrencyId
   43: EListPrice (DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktListPrice
   44: ESalePrice (DBTYPE_R8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktSalePrice
   45: EBuyable (DBTYPE_I4) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktBuyable
   46: xmlconfigid (DBTYPE_I8) = d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae Ektxmlconfigid
   47: DisabledTaxCategory (DBTYPE_WSTR | DBTYPE_BYREF) =
         d5cdd505-2e9c-101b-9397-08002b2cf9ae EktDisabledTaxCategory
   

5. Run the Ektron ‘SearchConfigUI’ utility to ‘Create New Catalogs’ (after checking all the settings are correct).
6. Once ‘SearchConfigUI’ has passed the ‘Updating XML Configuration for XML Content’ step, then you can ensure that:
   1. The QLFiltXml.xml file to ensure the correct filters have been installed
   2. The FriendlyNamesDefinition.txt to ensure that your indexed properties have been restored
7. Once ‘SearchConfigUI’ has completed, then you should be able to monitor the Indexing Service scanning the files in a more reasonable and consistent manner

The performance issue should now be fixed/reduced, hope this helps.