Question

When OPAC Word search results are 20,000 or greater, response time is about 30 seconds. Smaller result sets display in 3-10 seconds.
The GUI search does not have this problem. Even large result sets are returned in a couple seconds.
Why is there a difference?

Answer

The OPAC search is slow because the www_server.conf set_result_set_limit was set to 20000 and www_sort_limit was not specified, so it defaults to 999999.
The pc_server_defaults had no set_result_set_limit parameter and, therefore, defaulted to 1000.
As noted in the in the Aleph Configuration Guide, having a large set_result_set_limit value with no www_sort_limit can negatively impact performance.

Additional Information

The trade-offs are described in KCS Article 8192-8265 (How to Increase OPAC and GUI Results Displayed and Sorted).

Category: Web OPAC (500)

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013