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abstractrude
Xsan Master
Joined: 13 Mar 2008
Posts: 561
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 Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 9:18 pm Post subject: FS Search Xsan 2.2 |
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Has anyone tried this lower level FSSearch stuff in xsan2.2
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3749
Xsan 2.2 is starting to look like a great update. |
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abstractrude
Xsan Master
Joined: 13 Mar 2008
Posts: 561
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 1:43 pm Post subject: |
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JThorpe
Can you explain this feature better. Does it only index regaular expressions in file names? Does it still use the spotlight engine? |
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thorpej
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Joined: 25 Aug 2009
Posts: 10
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 3:26 pm Post subject: Xsan 2.2 and FS Search |
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| abstractrude wrote: | JThorpe
Can you explain this feature better. Does it only index regaular expressions in file names? Does it still use the spotlight engine? |
Yes, it uses the Spotlight engine to do the search and return the results.
Essentially, Spotlight supports 4 "search levels":
- None (no searching is performed)
- FS Search (searches against file system attributes only)
- Read-only index (searches against a Spotlight index, index is not maintained for file system changes)
- Read-write index (searches against a Spotlight index, index is maintained for file system changes)
FS Search does not use a Spotlight index at all. It performs searches ONLY against the file system attributes for a file / folder. This includes, among other things, the file name (it can perform partial matches, but no globbing / regular expressions), owner, group, size, etc. To do this, it uses a special high-speed file system attribute searching capability provided by the searchfs() system call (not all file systems support this -- only HFS+ and Xsan). Xsan 2.0 added some basic support for searchfs(), and Xsan 2.2 expanded this support to include essentially all of the attributes that Spotlight can search against.
The upshot of all of this is that you can perform basic Finder searches (e.g. name, modification date, etc.) even on Xsan volumes that have Spotlight indexing disabled. If you disable Spotlight entirely, Finder searches don't work very well (read: at all) since Finder uses Spotlight for its search engine. |
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abstractrude
Xsan Master
Joined: 13 Mar 2008
Posts: 561
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 3:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Interesting, this may be what I have always wanted, basic search functions without all the overhead of spotlight and the failover issues. One last question, does it require that Extended Attributes be native and do all clients have to be 2.2? I know you say Xsan 2 added this support but this functionality of FSSearch didnt seem to be implemented till 2.2 which is intel only... |
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thorpej
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Joined: 25 Aug 2009
Posts: 10
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| Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2009 4:02 pm Post subject: |
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| abstractrude wrote: | | Interesting, this may be what I have always wanted, basic search functions without all the overhead of spotlight and the failover issues. One last question, does it require that Extended Attributes be native and do all clients have to be 2.2? I know you say Xsan 2 added this support but this functionality of FSSearch didnt seem to be implemented till 2.2 which is intel only... |
If your MDCs and clients are Snow Leopard + Xsan 2.2, using FsSearch as the Spotlight search level will actually cause the clients to do the searches directly, rather than contacting the Spotlight server on the MDC to perform the search (the MDC still ends up performing the search, but via the lower-level searchfs() mechanism). This is a Snow Leopard-specific optimization.
If your MDCs are Snow Leopard + Xsan 2.2 and your clients are Leopard (2.1.1 or 2.2), then the client will proxy the Spotlight query through the MDC's Spotlight server, which will in turn issue a local searchfs() call and return the results via the Spotlight server mechanism. This is similar to what happens when you have full-blown Spotlight indexing enabled (in that case, the query is performed against the Spotlight index rather than with searchfs()).
Native extended attributes do not have to be enabled to use the FsSearch feature, although queries against file system attributes that are backed by native extended attributes (Finder Info, resource fork size, etc.) will be much slower because the search must parse AppleDouble files. |
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abstractrude
Xsan Master
Joined: 13 Mar 2008
Posts: 561
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| Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2009 4:13 pm Post subject: |
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| awesome. Looking forward to getting my controllers to snow leopard and xsan 2.2 sometime next spring I hope. awesome update with 2.2 |
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staze
Been around the blocks
Joined: 15 Oct 2007
Posts: 23
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| Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 2:28 am Post subject: |
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Anybody tried this yet? I currently have an Xsan reshared over AFP, and because I have turned spotlight off on the Xsan, I have to disable spotlight on all the clients that connect to the SAN over AFP since they'll start indexing it themselves if I don''t.
I'd really love to turn it on, but I've read the general lack of success about the read/write index method... so FsSearch seems rather appealing.
Thanks! |
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