Question

How does the physical pipe work and how often does it run?

Answer

Physical Delete Pipe is an internal tool/pipe to remove deleted PNXs physically and is being ran automatically after every Hotswap. Basically - normal pipe/delete pipe will mark relevant PNX records as deleted (logically). Hotswap will remove relevant index entries belonging to (logically) deleted PNX records from the index (Lucene) and physical_delete_pipe will then remove (logically) deleted PNX records

Due to the constraint that the physical_delete_pipe is optimized to handle only 500k PNX physical deletions per pipe run, large deletion operation may indeed take several physical delete pipe runs to remove them all from P_PNX.

So it is recommended not to run it manually because it runs automatically after every Hotswap.

For related information, see Ongoing Indexing.

• Article last edited: 05-Jun-2020